Beside the roaring Star-Core Automatic Soup & Pill Reactor, Hong Ling ran out of the supply car carrying a heavy iron sack that jingled with every step. Behind her, two Titan assistants carried a stack of ten-foot-tall red iron cabinets and a crate of vacuum-sealed thermos flasks.
“Young Master! Here are the mechanical coin-slot boxes we used at the bathhouse lockers, plus the micro-teleportation array plates from the railway signal yard!” Hong Ling said, setting the sack down with a loud THUD and wiping the sweat from her forehead. “Tell me the truth—can these little coin boxes really replace fifty million pharmacy clerks?”
Abacus Su leaned over with his brass spectacles slipping down his nose. “My Lord, I am all in favor of saving clerk wages, of course! Fifty million pharmacy clerks would eat three hundred million pork buns a day! However, if we put unmanned medicine cabinets out on remote mining planets and border train stops, what if greedy mercenaries or Void-Lotus spies try to pry open the cabinets to steal all the Rank 8 pills?”
Pei Xuan smiled and tapped the red iron cabinet with one finger.
“In Dry-Well Territory, nobody steals from public utilities without paying for the repairs,” Pei Xuan said calmly. “And since every cabinet will be linked directly to the Pulsar Reactor’s storage tanks by a micro-wormhole, the cabinet itself doesn’t hold a stockpile to steal—it only teleports one cup of soup or one bottle of pills after a genuine Dry-Well Grain-Note goes into…
