Half an hour later, Lead Locomotive Number One rolled across the newly paved six-lane orbital ring-bridge and glided down into the dusty yellow sky of Dry-Crater World (Planet Twelve).
The moment the train doors slid open at the edge of Crater-Rim Town, a blast of hot, gritty wind smelling of rusted iron and scorched clay blew across the platform.
Pei Xuan stepped down onto the dry cracked dirt and looked around.
Everywhere he looked, the yellow plains of Planet Twelve were pockmarked with deep, funnel-shaped meteor craters. At the bottom of each crater sat a shallow puddle of thick, brick-red mud-water that bubbled sluggishly in the heat.
Thousands of sun-darkened settlers in patched hemp clothes were climbing up and down the steep crater walls carrying wooden buckets on shoulder poles. Even the young men and women in their twenties had sunken cheeks, dry cracked lips, and missing front teeth—when they talked to each other, they whistled through the gaps in their gums like eighty-year-old grandfathers!
Right in the center of the town square, however, stood a grand, white-walled stone compound surrounded by a shimmering blue Rank 6 Peak Golden Core Barrier.
Above the compound gate hung a gold-leaf plaque reading [THE BLOOD-DROP WATER GUILD — BRANCH #1], and standing on a marble platform behind the barrier was Guild Master Qian Shui (“Water-Pincher” Qian), a plump Rank 6 Peak cultivator wearing a blue silk robe embroidered with silver waves.
