VROOOOOOOOM—CHOO-CHOO!
Across the freezing, pitch-black void of the Dead-Ash Barrens, ten thousand fifty-mile-long Divine Terraforming & Planting Ships sailed side by side in a gleaming golden wall, followed closely by five thousand Spirit-Furnace Star-Trains laying down glowing wormhole highway tracks right behind them.
Three million years ago, this vast western belt of one hundred and fifty galaxies had been known as the Emerald Cradle Sector—a prosperous mortal civilization of warm ocean worlds, ancient spirit forests, and trillions of peaceful families.
Then the Upper World’s Heaven-Reaping Ministry had decided they needed an extra batch of soul-pills for a God-King’s birthday banquet.
In a single dark night, the Golden Sickle Harvester Fleets had swept through all one hundred and fifty galaxies. They had sucked the oceans dry, ripped the spirit veins out of every continent, and drained the cores of the stars until only dead red cinders and freezing gray ash planets remained.
For three million years, nothing had grown in the Dead-Ash Barrens. Not a tree, not a weed, not even a single earthworm.
The trillions of mortal survivors whose ancestors had hidden inside hollow asteroids during the harvest lived their entire lives inside leaking, rusted-out iron cargo ships. They recycled their own sweat to drink, scraped bitter green radiation-lichen off cold space rocks to boil into thin gruel, and buried their dead in empty metal fuel drums.
