As night fell across Sector 2, a freezing, sleet-filled wind whipped down from the upper atmosphere of World 17: The Garden Housing Zone.
Before the big sects turned Sector 2 into a dumping ground three thousand years ago, World 17 had been a lovely planet of rolling hills, gentle rivers, and mild spring valleys. Even now, compared to the lava pits of World 15 and the flat plains of World 16, World 17 had the cleanest air and the prettiest hillsides.
Yet when Pei Xuan stepped off the Spirit-Furnace Star-Train at the foot of Green-Breeze Valley on World 17, he didn’t see a single proper house.
Instead, covering the hillsides for miles and miles was a sprawling, crooked shantytown made entirely out of rusted spaceship hull plates, flattened iron oil drums, and upside-down cracked bronze cauldrons!
Whenever the cold night sleet hit those millions of thin metal roofs, the whole valley echoed with a deafening PING-CLANG-RATTLE that made it impossible to hear yourself think. Cold rusty water dripped through the cracks in the tin sheets, and from inside every single shack came the sound of children and old people coughing with chronic winter lung-rot.
Right near the bottom of the hill, a skinny, sharp-chinned man in a fur-lined silk coat—with three long hairs growing out of a mole on his cheek—was standing outside an upside-down, cracked bronze alchemy cauldron no bigger than a doghouse.
