“Shoot... a hundred and sixty more slashes into your mouth so I can pay off one bridge by midnight?!”
Up in the starry sky above the Galactic Core Sword-Tomb, Sword Emperor Bai Xinghe trembled so hard that his long silver hair whipped around his face like a nest of angry silver snakes.
For fifty thousand years, his name had been a taboo across ten thousand solar systems. When mothers in the Galactic Core wanted their crying babies to go to sleep, they only had to whisper, “Stop crying, or the Milky Way Sword Emperor will hear you,” and the whole nursery would go dead silent.
Yet today, not only had his ultimate fifty-thousand-year sword river been swallowed like a bowl of noodle soup and burped out as train tracks, this twenty-something village chief was actually asking him for seconds—as a scrap-metal supplier!
Even worse, down on the third car of the train, Abacus Su was leaning out the window with a brass megaphone, nodding earnestly in agreement with Pei Xuan.
“Lord Pei is giving you a huge discount, Mister Bai!” Abacus Su shouted, waving his golden abacus in the air. “Normally, our municipal scrap-yards charge a twenty-percent environmental smoke fee for unrefined iron! If you fire a hundred and sixty more sword rivers into Lord Pei’s dantian before supper, I’ll waive the smoke fee AND throw in a free coupon for a bowl of Old Guo’s braised pork rice! Think about it—only four hundred and eighty slashes to pay off…
