“He... he used my Nine-Sun Emperor Scepter to stir the charcoal under a scallion-pancake griddle?!”
Atop the Nine-Sun Ancestral Altar, Patriarch Jin Taiyang stared at Old Guo’s kitchen window five million miles away, where the most sacred royal artifact of the Golden-Crow Sun Clan was currently scraping black coal ash out of a cast-iron stove.
Around the altar, the nine colossal suns that had burned unchecked since the dawn of the star-sector were now humming with a polite, domestic purr inside their giant brass Dry-Well Thermostat Jackets. Every time one of the nine stars tried to burp up a solar flare, a brass safety valve on its north pole let out a cheerful PHEEEEEW and routed the extra steam straight down to heat the public bathhouses on Planet 100-A.
Even the huge bronze sign above the altar’s main gate had been replaced by two of General Tie Zhan’s engineering drones, which had bolted up a glowing green neon billboard:
[DRY-WELL BOILER HOUSE #100 — CURRENT SETTING: MEDIUM-LOW SIMMER (ECO-FRIENDLY MODE)]
THUMP-CRACK!
Inside Patriarch Jin Taiyang’s skull, the 100,000-Year Ancestral Fire-Madness that had tortured every ruler of the Golden-Crow Clan finally snapped the last thread of his sanity.
“Medium-Low Simmer?! ECO-FRIENDLY MODE?!”
