Thirty light-years north of the main railway line lay the Blue-Howl Dead Zone.
At the center of this empty pocket of space spun a dying blue-white pulsar star. Although it had shrunk to the size of a large city, it still carried the crushing weight of three suns. It spun around five hundred times every second, whipping out twin beams of blinding blue radiation and magnetic storms that could melt an ordinary Rank 8 warship into slag in three breaths.
For ten thousand years, every navigator in the Orion-Jade Spiral Arm had steered ten light-years around this terrifying dead star.
Today, however, a bright yellow Sword-Rail track shot straight into the middle of the magnetic storm, and the ten-thousand-car Light-Year Sword-Rail Express pulled up right beside the howling pulsar with a cheerful CHOO-CHOO!
On the open flatbed car behind the engine, fifty thirty-foot-tall Titan engineers held down a massive, three-hundred-foot-tall black iron pot tied down with star-steel chains. It was Sun Baolu’s prized possession—the Unbreakable Black Cauldron that Pei Xuan had upgraded for him back when they first entered the stars. Even so, its lid was covered in dents from thousands of violent stew explosions.
Sun Baolu stood on the rim of his giant cauldron wearing thick brass goggles, his soot-stained apron flapping wildly in the cosmic solar wind.
