At two o’clock in the morning, the starry sky outside Supreme Edge Central Station should have been quiet except for the gentle chugga-chugga of night-shift freight trains hauling nebula rice and the soft hum of the [Galactic Land-Survey & Tax Compass] rotating on the roof of the Command Car.
Instead, the dark void just outside the thirty-system border was lit up like a lantern festival by twelve massive fleets of Immortal Sect flying ships!
“Enemy night attack?!” General Tie Zhan burst out of the barracks car carrying a fifty-pound iron dumbbell in one hand and a half-eaten cold pork bun in the other, his eyes wide with excitement. “Which sect is it?! Let me go out and warm up my shoulders!”
“Put your dumbbell down, General Tie,” Abacus Su said, peering through his brass telescope at the twelve approaching fleets with a puzzled frown on his face. “Look at their masts. Not a single ship has its weapon arrays charged. Instead, they’ve tied white bedsheets to their bowsprits, they have their turn-signal lanterns blinking at the legal forty-mile-per-hour approach speed, and every Sect Master is standing on the front deck holding an open account book over his head!”
Out in the starry void, a mile behind the yellow [STOP FOR TAX INSPECTION] sign outside the station, the twelve Sect Masters of the neighboring star clusters were indeed trembling like leaves in an autumn storm.
