On the open roof of Car Number Seven, the ancient Flood Dragon Ao Ming was having the worst night of his three-thousand-year life.
Even though he was a mighty Rank 7 Peak beast whose claws could tear iron battleships in half, dragons were cold-blooded creatures at heart—and three millennia of being pinned under Dry-Well Village by the Upper-Realm Spirit-Draining Nail had left him with terrible winter joint pain.
“Owowow, my lower back! My left knee-scale!” Ao Ming whined, coiling his hundred-foot golden body tighter around the cast-iron coal stove on the train deck. He even grabbed a giant canvas tarpaulin with his mouth and pulled it over his coral horns like a grandma wrapping herself in a shawl. “Kid Pei! Turn the train around! This place is colder than the bottom of the Nether River! Look at my whiskers—if I bend them, they’ll snap right off!”
Beside the well-car, Old Yellow—the lazy, bald Golden Dragon-Camel—poked his head out of the livestock car wearing a custom-knitted red wool sweater that Hong Ling had made from leftover blanket yarn. Old Yellow chewed on a hot Scorpion-Pepper biscuit, looked up at the shivering Flood Dragon, and let out a loud, mocking snort.
“Who are you snorting at, you bald camel?!” Ao Ming barked, though his teeth were chattering so fast it sounded like a woodpecker hitting an oak tree. “You have four wool sweaters stitched together! Where is my dragon sweater?! Do you know how much wool it takes to cover a hundred-foot…
