Outside the front windshield of the Light-Year Sword-Rail Express, the fifty white-robed elders of the Astral Wind Immortal Sect stood on their floating green jade gourds with their chins tilted forty-five degrees toward the stars.
Every single one of them had a long, carefully combed white beard that fluttered in the space-wind—not because the vacuum of space had a natural breeze, but because they were secretly burning their own Rank 7 Nascent Soul Wind-Qi inside their sleeves just to make their robes billow like dramatic immortals in a painting.
At the front of the formation stood Elder Feng Buping (Rank 7 Peak), the Outer Patrol Deacon of the Astral Wind Sect. He held a feathered horsehair whisk in one hand and pointed his nose at the twenty-mile-long black-and-gold iron train gliding down the yellow Sword-Rail toward them.
“Halt that ugly iron centipede at once!” Elder Feng Buping’s voice boomed across the local space channel via a sound-amplifying talisman. “This entire thirty-planet sector belongs to our Astral Wind Immortal Sect! For forty thousand years, every breeze that blows between these stars and every puff of air breathed by the lowly dirt-miners below has been the private property of our Sect Master! How dare you country bumpkins lay two yellow iron sticks into our territory without burning incense and offering tribute?!”
