“WOOOOOOO—CHUGGA-CHUGGA-CHUGGA!”
With a long, cheerful blast of its brass steam whistle, the lead Spirit-Furnace Star-Train rolled off the eastern ramp of the Dead-Ship Whirlpool Bridge and glided straight down the newly painted four-lane sky-highway into the central square of Shadow-Hollow City, the capital of World Thirty-Six.
Right behind Pei Xuan’s locomotive came the Jungle-Express Centipede Sightseeing Train—pulled by the ten-thousand-foot Rank 8 Centipede King wearing a giant red silk bow on its antennae and hauling fifty refrigerated boxcars packed to the roof with fresh Dragon-Blood Mangoes, Spirit-Bananas, and barrels of Sober-Mind Tea from Worlds Thirty-One to Thirty-Five!
However, when Pei Xuan stepped off the train onto the stone platform of Shadow-Hollow City, it felt like walking into the bottom of a cold, damp cellar.
Three miles overhead, a thick, suffocating blanket of pitch-black Eclipse-Smoke Clouds blocked out every ray of natural starlight. Because Phantom-Blade Ghost King and his Shadow-Wraith Sect had kept these black cloud formations running across Worlds Thirty-Six, Thirty-Seven, Thirty-Eight, Thirty-Nine, and Forty for three hundred years just so his disciples could practice shadow-stealth arts in broad daylight, not a single green blade of grass grew in the city flowerbeds.
Crowded around the edges of the dark square were millions of local townspeople.
