CLANG! GRIIIIIND—HISSSS!
Up at the northern edge of Galaxy #500, the hundred-light-year spatial gate leading to the Upper World let out a furious metallic groan as its ancient divine mechanism tried to slam the two towering golden doors shut for the fourteenth time that morning.
It couldn’t budge a single inch.
Wedged tightly into the top and bottom hinges of the colossal portal were two mountain-sized rectangular bricks made of compressed black-hole sewage slag—sliced and hammered into place the day before by Chief Highway Engineer Ye Guhan.
Even worse for the pride of the God Realm, clamped right over the ten-mile-wide gap between the wedged doors was a giant, funnel-shaped black-iron pipe. Every three seconds, the suction fan inside the funnel roared like a hungry pig, sucking thick, sparkling clouds of Upper-World Immortal Mist straight out of the God Realm’s sky and pumping it down through insulated pipes into Dry-Well Federation’s public watermelon greenhouses!
“Pressure gauge is steady at ninety-nine percent, Young Master!”
Down on the greenhouse observation deck of Agricultural Ring-World #500, Old Guo wiped his sweaty, beaming face with a grease-stained kitchen towel and tapped a brass pipe valve with his giant iron soup ladle.
Even though Old Guo was now a Rank 9 Early Peak culinary cultivator whose iron wok could block a falling meteor, he still wore his familiar patched white chef’s apron over his robes.
