Fifteen minutes after leaving Copper-Dock City on the Interplanetary Commuter Express, Pei Xuan stepped off the train onto the wide stone platform of World 16 (The Mega-Farm Zone).
Even before the train doors slid all the way open, the warm, rich smell of sun-baked wheat, sweet corn, and freshly dug Meat-Potatoes washed into the carriage.
Lin Da, the skinny grain peddler from World 19 who had been invited along to witness the birth of Dry-Well’s upgraded Star-Belt paper money, stepped onto the platform and froze in his tracks. His jaw dropped so wide that the half-eaten sesame biscuit in his hand tumbled onto his boot.
In front of the train station stood Central Granary #1 of World 16.
It was not a normal wooden barn. It was a row of three hundred colossal dome-shaped silos forged from shiny Magnet-Toad steel, each one as tall as a mountain peak and stretching across the horizon as far as the eye could see! Automated conveyor belts ran from the red Spirit-Tractors in the fields straight into the tops of the domes, pouring endless golden waterfalls of husked Spirit-Rice, plump yellow wheat, and five-pound Meat-Potatoes into temperature-controlled storage vaults.
At the base of Silo #1, Bald Vulture—the former Rank 7 Peak pirate warlord, still wearing his bright yellow Debtor vest—was happily driving a red forklift tractor, stacking ten-ton crates of dried Spirit-Hemp bark while humming a work song.
