Thirty million light-years north of Galaxy #350 lay the Hundred-Petal Star Sector—a loose alliance of one hundred mortal galaxies that had not yet signed up to join Pei Xuan’s Dry-Well Federation.
Why hadn’t they joined earlier?
Because the rulers of the Hundred-Petal Sector—led by an ancient, cautious Rank 9 Mid scholar named Grand Sovereign Bai—had read the ancient stone prophecies warning that the Upper World’s Million-Year Harvest was due this year.
Grand Sovereign Bai had believed that Pei Xuan’s booming 350-galaxy federation was too fat, too bright, and too loud, and that when the Upper-World Gods finally opened the Heaven-Reaping Gate, Dry-Well Cluster would be the very first target wiped off the star map!
Instead of joining Pei Xuan, the rulers of all one hundred galaxies had spent the last ten years building massive Self-Destruction Soul-Scattering Altars in the center of their capital planets.
An hour ago, when the hundred-light-year golden gate tore open the northern sky and Harvester General Jin Ge broadcast his chilling decree across five hundred galaxies, Grand Sovereign Bai and sixteen trillion citizens across the Hundred-Petal Sector had fallen into utter despair.
Because the glare of the Ten-Thousand-Sickle Extinction Beam had temporarily blinded their long-range observation mirrors, they hadn’t seen what happened after the beam fired!
