CHOO-CHOO! CLANK-CLANK-CLANK!
Twenty heavy cargo Star-Trains, each pulling a hundred reinforced flatbed cars stacked high with gleaming Dry-Well Grade-A Steel Ingots from the Magnet-Toads of World 16, rumbled across the wormhole bridge and pulled into the Great Flame-Vein Canyon on World 15: The Heavy Forge Zone.
Down at the bottom of the five-hundred-mile canyon, a mighty river of natural golden-red lava bubbled and flowed out of the planet’s mantle. Because Pei Xuan’s Planetary Zoning Stamp had already boosted World 15’s natural fire veins by two hundred percent, the heat rising from the lava river was so pure and steady that ordinary iron would glow cherry-red just sitting on the canyon rim.
Scattered along the rocky ledges above the lava river stood fifty thousand crude stone blacksmith sheds.
Nearly two hundred thousand bare-chested, muscular blacksmiths—men and women with skin tanned dark bronze by centuries of volcano heat—stood outside their sheds watching the train unload the mountain of mirror-bright steel ingots.
At the front of the crowd stood an old, one-legged blacksmith leaning on an iron crutch as thick as a tree trunk. He had a braided beard singed gray by forge sparks, forearms thicker than water buckets, and a fierce, stubborn scowl on his scarred face.
