Viewed from deep space, the Dark-Ice Sector didn’t look dark or frozen anymore.
Where four dead, pitch-black balls of ice had drifted in silent misery for ten thousand years, Worlds 23, 24, 25, and 26 now shone like four warm, golden-red festival lanterns suspended in the starry void!
Hundreds of thousands of crystal Ice-Dome Greenhouses sparkled like diamonds across their surfaces. Beneath their crusts, Ao Ming’s brass radiator grid pulsed like golden veins of warm blood, while silver Spirit-Furnace Star-Trains zipped back and forth through glowing wormhole tunnels every fifteen minutes, carrying laughing tourists, fresh green cabbages, and steaming pots of mutton broth between twenty-six united worlds.
Across those four newly warmed planets, fifteen billion former ice-miners finished their evening hot-pot meals, tucked their rosy-cheeked children into warm 72-degree beds, and looked toward the main Hot-Spring Pavilion on World 26 with hands clasped in heartfelt gratitude.
“Thank heavens for Lord Pei Xuan...” “May the Sovereign of Dry-Well Village live ten thousand years...”
Billions of tiny, warm golden motes of pure citizen faith and gratitude rose from every cave, courtyard house, and night-market stall across the sector, streaming across space like a river of fireflies to converge above the roof of World 26’s central Hot-Spring Pavilion!
