SLUUUUUUURP—GURGLE—WHOOSH!
Across the vast dark void of the Central Supercluster, the Galactic Solar-Siphon Collector hummed like a giant brass water pump on a busy morning.
Inside the fifty-thousand-mile-wide funnel at Civic Galaxy Plaza #200, the roaring golden beam of the Nine-Suns Burning Heaven Formation wasn’t pushing forward an inch. Instead, pulled by the fused suction of a supermassive black hole and guided by Pei Xuan’s municipal thermostat array, the golden fire-beam was being sucked down the pipe at ten times the speed it had been fired!
At the back of the collector, eighty gigantic insulated bronze distribution pipes glowed with a cheerful, warm orange light as they pumped the filtered solar heat straight across folded space into eighty freezing, pitch-black outer galaxies of the Nine-Suns Immortal Dynasty.
Standing beside the main pressure gauge, Ao Ming—the ancient Flood Dragon who now served as Chief Inspector of the Central Heating Pipe Grid—popped his giant horned dragon head out of Maintenance Hatch #4, chewing on a whole roasted spiced sheep that Old Guo had just tossed him.
“Master Pei, the water pressure in these new pipes is fantastic!” Ao Ming rumbled happily, his golden dragon whiskers twitching as warm solar steam swirled around his scales. “I just swam down Pipe #44 to check the valves in the eastern peasant galaxies. Those nine thousand royal suns have been marinating in pure star-Qi for a hundred thousand years! Once your Fusion Cube filtered out the fire-poison, the heat coming out of the radiator vents smells…
