Across the ten-mile iron chain bridge from Iron-Jaw Fortress sat the Forbidden Breeding Moon—a five-hundred-mile-wide black rock honeycombed with ten thousand deep underground caverns.
In the past, even the Iron-Mandible Clan’s own soldiers hated being assigned to guard duty on this moon. The tunnels were dark, damp, and stank of rotten beast blood and acid mud.
Now, Pei Xuan stood at the rim of the main central crater alongside Old Guo, Sun Baolu (“Boom-Pot Sun”), Abacus Su, and the newly converted Patriarch Chong Bawang (who was still wiping five-spice chili oil off his beard with a big happy grin).
Right behind them floated the thousand-foot Star-Locust Queen (“Xiao Jin”), her brass bell chiming softly as she waited for instructions.
“My Lord, look down here,” Patriarch Chong Bawang said eagerly, pointing into the vast underground cavern network. “This moon has three hundred natural geo-thermal spirit veins underneath the crust! Before I tasted Chef Guo’s cooking and saw the light, my clan used these warm caves to hatch aggressive armor-plated war-bugs. But if Queen Xiao Jin and my elders switch to the Sweet-Straw Non-Sentient Meat-Prawn Strain—which are unintelligent, shell-less protein grubs and plump rice-grasshoppers fed purely on Golden Nebula Rice stalks and Sweet-Spring water—these caves can grow fifty billion tons of clean, high-protein meat-bugs and sweet rice-shrimp every single day!”
