Clack-clack-clack!
Hong Ling’s fingers flew across her golden star-iron abacus so fast that little sparks popped off the beads.
She stood inside the main hall of the Dry-Well Galactic Town Hall, wearing a neat red apron over her Rank 8 Peak armor. Two heavy kitchen cleavers still hung from her waist—only now those cleavers were forged from compressed star-cores and could slice a moon in half like a cucumber.
“Young Master! Look at these numbers!” Hong Ling slammed a three-foot-tall stack of jade ledgers onto Pei Xuan’s desk. The desk, carved from a single piece of ancient spirit-oak, groaned under the weight. “If we don’t find a new place to dump the garbage by tomorrow morning, I am going to start charging a five-copper trash tax on every single hot-pot meal!”
Pei Xuan looked up from a bowl of warm sweet-spring tea. He was now a Rank 9 Early (Early-Galactic Realm) ruler, dressed in a comfortable, clean gray cotton robe that looked almost the same as the one he wore back in the desert—except the threads were woven from starlight silk that could block a supernova without getting wrinkled.
“Calm down, Little Ling,” Pei Xuan said with a warm smile, pushing a plate of crispy fried scorpion snacks toward her. “Take a breath. We just finished hooking up the central heating pipes for all thirty northern galaxies yesterday. The Winter Hot-Pot Festival was a big hit. How can we already have a trash problem?”
