Ten minutes after Ao Ming reported what he had found, Pei Xuan’s Engine #1 rolled straight through the bronze gates of the Galactic Core Coalition Military Dockyard.
This dockyard floated inside a hollowed-out dark star where the 108 Sect Masters used to park their private luxury pleasure-yachts—five-mile-long flying palaces made of gold, ivory, and silk where the sect leaders held drunken banquets across the star systems.
However, those massive golden pleasure-yachts didn’t run on coal or spirit furnaces.
Hanging in the freezing, pitch-black void beneath the yachts were three hundred gigantic cages forged from Soul-Piercing Black Cold-Iron.
Inside each narrow cage coiled a thousand-foot-long Rank 8 Ancient Star-Dragon!
Their silver and azure dragon scales were dull, cracked, and covered in whip scars. Thick black-iron hooks were pierced right through their shoulder blades and dragon horns, linking them to heavy tow-chains that pulled the Sect Masters’ pleasure-yachts through space. Because the 108 Sects were afraid the dragons would rebel if they had enough energy, the beasts had been starved for thousands of years on moldy asteroid moss and freezing dirty ice-water!
When the warm, golden headlights of Pei Xuan’s Star-Train shone into the dark dockyard, the three hundred scarred Star-Dragons flinched and bared their fangs defensively, thinking the sect beast-tamers had come back with lightning whips.
