BUUUUUURP!
A sound like ten thousand bronze foghorns echoed across the sunny skies of the Green-Pasture Star Sector back in the Milky Way.
Floating right in the middle of an artificial nebula filled with warm sweet-spring mist were ten thousand gigantic Void Whales.
Back in the earlier era, when Pei Xuan first ran into this pod of ancient cosmic beasts, they were fierce, starving monsters that swam through solar systems eating asteroids and chewing on battleship hulls.
Now?
After two years of eating leftover spirit-melon rinds, potato skins, and Old Guo’s kitchen scraps every single day, the ten thousand Void Whales had grown so round and fat that they looked like floating purple dirigibles!
The leader of the pod—a planet-sized bull whale that Hong Ling had named Big Tubby—was currently floating upside down on his back between two farm moons, lazily flapping his stubby pectoral fins while three hundred farm barges dumped tons of sweet watermelon rinds into his wide-open mouth.
CHOO-CHOO!
