Twelve hours after the five Red Giant Stars were capped with pressure-cooker safety valves, Supernova Resort Planet #75 had already become the liveliest hub in the Red-Ember Belt.
Because Planet #75 sat right in the middle of the ten-system chain, Pei Xuan had parked his flagship Star-Train above its capital city and designated the planet’s central valley as Grand Supernova Hot-Spring Resort #1.
White marble pavilions stretched for three hundred miles across the valley floor, surrounded by orchards of newly planted Meat-Potatoes and steaming canals of golden starlight mineral water. Every five minutes, a shiny black-and-gold Star-Train pulled into the central station, unloading tens of thousands of excited families, retired miners, and curious cultivators from neighboring systems who had heard the live broadcast.
On the afternoon train from System #71, sitting in the very back corner of Car #14, was a hunched-over old man wearing a patched, soot-stained gray linen cloak.
He had used a Rank 8 Bone-Shrinking Art to bend his spine into a crooked hump, smeared grey stove-ash across his face to hide his fiery eyebrows, and sealed 99.9% of his terrifying Rank 8 Late Peak aura inside his dantian. To anyone looking at him, he appeared to be nothing more than an eighty-year-old mortal grandpa with a bad back and a grumpy scowl.
