“A giant... crooked circle?”
Ye Guhan repeated the words slowly. Every syllable sounded like he was chewing on broken glass.
Since the day he couldn’t pay for his bowl of braised beef noodles back in Dry-Well Village and was convinced by Pei Xuan that carving straight canals and flat highways was the true Supreme Dao of the Sword, Ye Guhan had laid thirty-five planets’ worth of ruler-straight roads. If a single brick on a ten-thousand-mile viaduct sat higher than its neighbor by the thickness of a hair, Ye Guhan couldn’t sleep at night until he went back and shaved it flat.
Now someone was telling him to build a crooked detour?
“Don’t blame Lord Pei, Kid Ye!” Crag-Devourer called out from the flatbed car, leaning on his giant iron shovel. “Even when I ruled thirty planets, my stone warships had to sail three days around the rim of this sinkhole. Look at those black currents! The crushed star-cores at the bottom spin counterclockwise at fifty thousand miles an hour. Anything you shoot in there gets bent like a warm wax candle!”
On the platform floor, Shadow-Squad Leader Wu—still tied up in silver spider-silk—let out a hoarse, mocking cackle.
“He’s right, yellow-hat boy!” Wu sneered, squinting at the skinny young swordsman. “Are you a sword cultivator? Don’t embarrass yourself! Last year, the Old Sword Ancestor of the Seven-Star Sect—a peak Rank 7 master who trained for eight hundred years—came here boasting he could split the whirlpool. When he slashed his sword…
