CHOO-CHOOOOO!
A shrill, cheerful brass whistle echoed across the starry sky above World 30 as Spirit-Furnace Express Train #01 roared out of Central Station and shot straight up the golden orbital ramp toward Toll Booth #40!
Standing on the front cowcatcher of the locomotive, with his blue work coat snapping in the solar wind and his yellow safety hard-hat strapped tightly under his chin, was Dry-Well Kingdom’s Chief Highway Engineer—Ye Guhan.
One year ago, when Ye Guhan had first wandered into Dry-Well Village, he had been a broke, starving sword prodigy who couldn’t afford a bowl of beef noodles and accidentally cracked three road bricks. Back then, he had thought the highest realm of the Sword Dao was standing lonely on a cold mountain peak and slashing at clouds.
Now, after carving ten-mile irrigation canals, slicing asteroid fields into square gravel, and splitting the hundred-thousand-mile Dead-Ship Gravity Whirlpool into two neat drainage ditches, Ye Guhan had seen the true light of the universe:
The Ultimate Sword Dao was Municipal Civil Engineering!
In Ye Guhan’s eyes, a crooked road was a sin against heaven, an uneven curb stone was a heart-demon, and an unpermitted fifty-mile iron pipe sticking out into the middle of a four-lane wormhole highway was a mortal insult to every sword cultivator in history!
