CLINK—TICK—DING!
With a cheerful chime like an oven timer finishing a New Year’s roast, the Two-Million-Mile Star-Iron Rotating Spit came to a smooth, gentle stop between the nine thermostat-wrapped suns of Solar System No. 100.
Suspended in the center of the starry void, the Million-Mile Three-Legged Golden Crow no longer looked like a crazed, screaming monster of destructive plasma.
Under five coats of Old Guo’s Five-Spice Honey, Roasted Garlic, and Sweet-Spring Cooling Mint Glaze, every single feather on the giant bird’s body shone with a calm, warm, amber-gold luster. The black veins of the 100,000-Year Ancestral Fire-Madness had been completely purged from his skull and bone marrow, replaced by a soothing, crystal-clear circulation of balanced Solar-Furnace Qi.
Even the nine suns around him seemed to hum a relaxing lullaby as a small flying inspection platform glided right up in front of the Golden Crow’s honey-glazed beak.
Standing on the platform was Abacus Su, wearing his neat blue bookkeeper’s robe. His round brass spectacles gleamed under the nine suns as he unrolled a fifty-foot-long yellow paper scroll with one hand and raised a fused Interstellar Megaphone with the other.
SCREECH—TAP-TAP!
“Testing, one, two, three,” Abacus Su’s crisp voice echoed across all one hundred solar systems, broadcast live to two trillion citizens watching on the sky-screens. “Citizen Jin Taiyang, former Patriarch of the Golden-Crow Sun Clan! Please remove the silicone apple from your beak and listen carefully to your itemized municipal infraction notice!”
