CLANG! CLANG! DING-DONG!
“Step right up, neighbors! Don’t push, there’s plenty for every kitchen and barn in the galaxy! One rusty iron knife trades for one brand-new Rank 9 Cosmic Star-Iron Vegetable Cleaver! One chipped hoe trades for one Star-Iron Furrow Hoe! Zero Grain-Notes, zero tax, and a ten-thousand-year municipal warranty!”
Three days after the Black-Hole Star-Iron Foundries went online, every single village supply coop and town square across Dry-Well’s newly expanded galaxies held a Free Municipal Hardware Trade-In Day.
Out on the far western rim of Galaxy #612, on a sunny, newly terraformed agricultural world called Green-Turnip Planet, an eighty-two-year-old woman named Grandma Liu walked out of the Sweet-Water Village supply coop carrying a brand-new rectangular kitchen cleaver wrapped in brown butcher paper.
Grandma Liu was five feet tall, wore a blue polka-dot kerchief tied neatly around her silver hair, and walked with a brisk, lively bounce in her cloth shoes. Six months ago, she had been a frail mortal refugee on a freezing ark. After moving to Green-Turnip Planet, eating three Longevity Radish Balls at the senior center, and practicing the Universal Civic Galaxy Canon during the village’s morning square-dance sessions, she had smoothly opened her dantian and reached Rank 4 Qi Gathering!
