At the stroke of midnight, the system bell chimed inside Pei Xuan’s mind, depositing 685 Billion LP from his fourteen worlds and pushing his total balance to 820 Billion LP.
Out at the four-way wormhole junction—where the main ten-thousand-mile tunnel from Planet Ten split into four elevated orbital highways serving Planets Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen, and Fourteen—traffic was already bumper-to-bumper.
Hundreds of Spirit-Furnace Star-Trains, accompanied by tens of thousands of frontier ore barges, grain wagons, and merchant skiffs, were crisscrossing the intersection around the clock.
Right in the middle of this busy cosmic cloverleaf floated Junction Rock, a barren, pancake-flat gray asteroid ten miles wide.
Currently, a dozen long-distance cargo barges were parked awkwardly on the dusty rock. Tired ship captains were trying to boil dry noodles over tiny alcohol lamps in the freezing space wind, while three blacksmith apprentices hammered desperately on a bent train axle with hand mallets.
“Brrr! My fingers are so numb I dropped my wrench three times!” one of the mechanics complained, blowing into his cupped hands. “And there’s not even a shed to block the wind! If you try to use the latrine bucket out here without a heat array, your backside freezes to the rim!”
