Just beyond the spinning windmills of the [Galactic Wind-Power Stew Factory] hung a terrifying wall of floating black rock: the 500,000-Mile Star-Iron Meteor Belt.
Unlike ordinary asteroid belts where rocks drifted miles apart, this meteor belt had been compressed by forty thousand years of astral hurricanes into a grinding, chaotic wall of black star-iron boulders. Each boulder was the size of a mountain peak, weighed billions of tons, and crashed against its neighbors with deafening CLANG-CRACK impacts that threw off showers of blue lightning sparks.
Standing on the observation deck of the Stew Factory, Grand Elder Feng Luan—wearing his bright yellow [SENIOR DEBTOR POT-SCRUBBER] vest and holding an oily dish-towel—pointed at the grinding wall of star-iron meteors with a solemn expression.
“Mayor Pei, look closely at those black rocks,” Grand Elder Feng Luan said earnestly. “That is Cold-Quenched Astral Star-Iron! Even a Rank 8 Early Star Realm cultivator like me can only chip off a piece the size of a washbasin with a full-power strike! Whenever our sect’s flying ships travel from the Hurricane Eye to the Sect Master’s inner palace, we have to fly three light-years around the top of this meteor belt, which takes two whole days! If you try to drill a straight railway tunnel through five hundred thousand miles of solid star-iron, even ten thousand laser-drilling crabs would wear out their teeth and take ten years!”
