After finishing a satisfying lunch of sweet-and-sour star-pork ribs and hot Sweet-Spring tea, Pei Xuan walked out onto the Quality-Control Testing Dock three hundred miles east of the White Dwarf Stamp-Press.
Tethered in the center of the empty testing zone floated Civic Patrol Cruiser #1,500—an unmanned, freshly stamped black-iron hull that had just rolled out of the quenching tunnel five minutes ago. Its one-mile-long obsidian armor gleamed like a polished black mirror under the white starlight, and its ten-foot-thick front bumper pulsed faintly with golden runes.
Around the perimeter of the testing zone stood General Tie Zhan, Old Wei, Hong Ling, Abacus Su, Master Blacksmith Lu, and four thousand yellow-vested Iron-Wing prisoners led by Squadron Commander Ma and Captain Liu, who were taking a ten-minute break from waxing windshields.
Standing fifty miles in front of the unmanned cruiser was a tall, slender young man in snow-white robes with a cold, handsome face and an ancient iron sword strapped across his back.
It was Ye Guhan, the once-arrogant sword prodigy who had eaten three bowls of Old Guo’s beef noodles back in the Red-Sand Wastes without a copper coin in his pocket, accidentally cracked three road bricks, and spent the last six years slicing mountain canals, paving wormhole highways, and clearing asteroid belts to pay off his compounding noodle tab.
