WHOOOOOOSH—SHHHHHHH!
Across all ninety mining planets of Systems 91 to 100, the sky changed color in the blink of an eye.
For ten thousand generations, the people born in the Golden-Crow Ancestral Nest had never seen a blue sky, never touched a blade of green grass, and never taken a single breath that didn’t burn their throats like hot ash. From the day a child was born in the volcanic crystal pits to the day an old miner collapsed beside an ore cart, the air had always been a suffocating, merciless 150 degrees.
Now, as the ninety orbital Sweet-Spring Evaporation Chillers spun overhead—powered by Patriarch Jin Taiyang’s own hijacked Nine-Sun World-Melting Formation—a gentle, emerald-blue mist drifted down from the heavens.
On Scorch-Rock Planet No. 1, the giant red thermometer bolted to the wall of Mining Pit #402 began to drop so fast the mercury looked like a falling waterfall:
150°F... 130°F... 105°F... 85°F... 70.0°F!
DING!
A soft, cool spring breeze—the exact temperature of an April morning beside a mountain stream—swept across the cracked red clay of the mining valley.
