Five million miles above Herb-Ash World #1, the vacuum of space boiled with blinding orange-and-yellow light.
The binary suns of System #21—known on the local star charts as Big Fire-Crow and Little Fire-Crow—spun around each other in a violent cosmic dance. Every ten minutes, their magnetic fields clashed, whipping out million-mile tongues of raw solar plasma that could melt an ordinary Rank 7 warship into slag in three breaths.
Floating at a safe distance on the high observation balcony of the Nine-Sun Alchemy Tower on the capital planet below, Deacon Huo, the chief furnace inspector of System #21, pointed his brass spyglass up at the sky and sneered.
“Look at those ignorant bumpkins from the Junkyard Sector!” Deacon Huo laughed, stroking his singed goatee as twenty apprentice alchemists stood behind him holding fans. “Word just came from Red-Mortar Town that some country mayor named Pei Xuan chopped up Shopkeeper Qian’s counter and bragged about ‘baking pills on the twin suns’! Look—their black iron ships are actually flying straight toward the Binary Flare Zone!”
“Haha! Are they crazy, Deacon Huo?” a young apprentice in yellow robes snickered. “Even our Nine-Sun Alchemy Alliance only dares to set up solar mirrors three hundred million miles away to catch a tiny trickle of sun-fire! Nobody can approach within ten million miles of the Twin Suns without being burned to black ash!”
