By the third afternoon since the Light-Year Sword-Rail Express entered the Mirage-Moon Star Belt, three hundred of the four hundred pleasure-planets had already been cleared of pink illusion fog.
As Engine #1 pulled into the central plaza of Planet #280 (Neon-Moon City), the streets smelled of refreshing peppermint oil and Old Guo’s sizzling cumin lamb skewers. Old sect elders with freshly regrown, glossy black hair walked past whistling cheerful tunes, carrying brown cardboard Dry-Well Express boxes under their arms.
However, as Pei Xuan walked down the wide marble boulevard accompanied by Ye Guhan, General Tie Zhan, Hong Ling, and Abacus Su, he noticed a strange sight outside the shuttered doors of the city’s former “Dream-Lotus Illusion Halls.”
Sitting along the marble curbstones were tens of thousands of young cultivators between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five.
They were dressed in expensive silk robes, holding folding fans and jade pendants, but every single one of them was slouched over like a wilted cabbage, sighing loudly at the sky.
“Ugh, I’m so bored I could grow mushrooms on my head!”
A nineteen-year-old youth in a silver brocade robe—Young Master Lin, the third son of the local Neon-Moon Merchant Guild (Rank 5 Early Foundation Establishment)—kicked a pebble across the sidewalk and groaned.
