At six o’clock the next morning, before the twin suns of Jade-Plow Planet had even climbed above the dusty hills, Little Stone woke up and rubbed his eyes.
For the first time in his ten years of life, his chest didn’t ache with cold frost, and his belly felt warm and full of strength from the meat-potato bun he had eaten the night before.
“Mom! Dad!” Little Stone hopped off his straw bed and pulled open the wooden shutter of their mud hut. “Let’s go see if Lord Pei really built a—”
Little Stone froze mid-sentence. His jaw dropped so wide a sparrow could have flown inside.
Just two hundred steps down the street, where a smelly gravel pit had sat the night before, ten thirty-foot-tall Star-Titan Construction Workers wearing yellow hard hats were wiping sweat from their foreheads and packing up their giant iron trowels!
Behind the Titans stood a brand-new, three-story building made of bright red kiln-fired bricks with sparkling glass windows, a green grass playground, iron monkey bars, and a tall flagpole flying the golden banner of Dry-Well Village!
Above the wide front gate hung a polished wooden plaque carved in Pei Xuan’s own neat handwriting:
DRY-WELL GALACTIC ELEMENTARY SCHOOL #1 (JADE-PLOW BRANCH)
