The morning after the great Spirit-Stone pavement project finished, Hong Ling and Abacus Su walked into Pei Xuan’s office on World 22 with dark circles under their eyes and five broken abacuses tucked under their arms.
Behind them, Master Gold-Tooth—still wearing his yellow Debtor vest and a neat little blue bank clerk cap—was pushing a handcart loaded with three hundred ledger books.
“Young Master,” Hong Ling said, rubbing her sore wrists as she flopped down onto a wooden chair and reached for a plate of steamed pork buns, “our Paper Grain-Notes are too popular! Across Worlds 19, 20, 21, and 22, twelve billion people are trying to use our Star-Train station exchange windows at the same time!”
“It’s not just the people in the big harbor cities, My Lord,” Abacus Su added, pushing up his brass spectacles and unrolling a map of the twenty-two worlds. “What about the herb gatherers living five hundred miles up in the mountain valleys of World 20? Or the night-shift iron miners in the deep craters of World 11? Right now, if a mountain farmer harvests ten baskets of spirit-mushrooms at midnight and wants to trade them for Grain-Notes—or if a night-shift worker wants to cash a 1-Jin Note for a hot meal at two in the morning—they have to walk ten miles to the nearest train station!”
