Three light-years east of Dry-Well Cluster’s border, inside the dark, freezing capital planet of the Iron-Fist Warlord Galaxy, Warlord Ba (Rank 9 Early) stood on his fortress balcony screaming at ten thousand shivering garrison soldiers.
“Tighten your belts and stop looking across the border!” Warlord Ba roared, wearing three layers of thick sable furs while holding a golden goblet of warm wine that only he was allowed to drink. “Pei Xuan’s school lunches and fried locusts are all illusions created by demonic arrays! If you join Dry-Well Cluster, that stingy mayor will put you in yellow vests and make you pave roads!”
Down in the frozen courtyard, the ten thousand garrison soldiers—who hadn’t been paid in forty years and were currently holding bowls of frozen grey turnip-root water—didn’t even look at Warlord Ba.
Instead, every single soldier was staring through a giant border telescope pointed straight at Dry-Well Civic Galaxy Plaza #100.
Right inside the lens of the telescope, on the sunny green bank of Ring-World Farm #1, their former neighbor—the scarred Ash-Star general Tie Bao, who had fled across the border empty-handed a month ago—was sitting under an osmanthus tree wearing a crisp new uniform, radiating a booming Rank 9 Early Galactic Realm aura, and eating a steaming bowl of braised beef-grain noodles while a fluffy yellow Honey-Bun Delivery Bee handed his seven-year-old daughter a jar of Rank 9 Star-Honey!
