WHOOO—OOOH!
Ten thousand brass steam-whistles blew at the exact same second, shaking the starry void until loose asteroid dust danced like golden snow.
At the border of Solar System No. 90, the twelve-lane Light-Speed Solar Highway came to an end right in front of a massive wall of boiling red clouds. Beyond that fiery curtain lay Systems 91 to 100—the sacred, forbidden heartland known across the star-charts as the Golden-Crow Ancestral Nest.
For a hundred thousand years, no outsider had ever entered these last ten solar systems without crawling on their knees to pay tribute. Today, however, nobody was crawling.
Leading the charge was Dry-Well Express No. 1, its black-iron locomotive gleaming under the light of ninety tamed suns. Flanking the flagship train in neat, disciplined columns were 50,000 White-Dwarf Civic Patrol Cruisers, their ten-foot rubberized front bumpers polished to a mirror shine. Right above the cruisers swam 100 hundred-mile-long Void Whales, each wearing a bright orange “Dry-Well Sanitation Dept.” vest and a flashing yellow beacon on its forehead. And right behind them rolled a fleet of 100,000 converted Solar-Fire Takeout Chariots, loaded to the roof with insulated boxes of hot braised worm-rice, crispy space-shrimp, and iced mung-bean soup.
Out on the front observation deck of the flagship locomotive, Pei Xuan stood with his hands tucked into his warm cotton sleeves. Inside his dantian, nine miniature golden suns spun smoothly around his central furnace core, humming with Rank 8 Late Peak power.
