On New Year’s Day of the Star Calendar, the entire Broken Star Belt—which for three thousand years had been called the “Dark Sector of Bones and Rust” on cosmic star-maps—shone like a fifty-pearl golden crown in the middle of deep space.
Every single wormhole highway from Planet 1 (Canglan World) to Planet 50 (Crimson-Spring World) was decked out in ten-mile-wide red silk lanterns, glowing paper banners, and fragrant garlands of World 35’s tropical flowers.
At the very center of the fifty-planet ring floated the newly christened Dry-Well Star-Hub Station (The Capital Moon), its thirty-mile white-jade dome gleaming under the warm light of a hundred thousand artificial sun-lamps.
Inside the ten-mile-wide Grand Central Food Dome at the heart of the Capital Moon, Old Guo and Boom-Pot Sun were having the greatest morning of their lives.
“More fire, Old Dragon! Turn up the bottom vents by twenty percent!” Old Guo shouted joyfully, standing on a flying wooden kitchen platform while wearing a crisp white chef’s hat three feet tall and wielding an iron ladle the size of a rowboat.
Beneath the central one-mile-wide Unbreakable Spirit-Alloy Cauldron, the ancient flood dragon Ao Ming and the thousand-foot Glacier Wyrm were coiled around the main brass heating manifolds. Ao Ming had just eaten twenty tons of spicy cumin lamb ribs as a kitchen appetizer, and his golden dragon-fire was roaring into the furnace grates with happy rumbles!
