“Auntie Qin! Mom and Dad! The barren soil down on Planets 61 through 70 has no seeds left at all! The young children there are sick from having no fresh fruit to eat, so please open our courtyard seed barn right now!”
On the sunlit front porch of the [Gu Family Flying Courtyard Star-Cruiser] above Planet 61, ten-year-old Su Nuannuan—wearing her pink hand-knitted sweater with the four upside-down “gravity-defying seed-dispenser pockets” that her mother had accidentally sewn on the day before—stood on tiptoe beside the medical scanner, her small hands clenched earnestly around the handle of her [Fused Ten-Thousand-Herb Pink Watering Can].
Down on the thawed surface of Planets 61 through 70, the mile-thick glaciers had already melted under the warm 75-degree rays of Heater-Suns #11 through #20.
Yet because the cruel alchemy overseers of Sector 6 had strip-mined every inch of topsoil off these ten worlds centuries ago to refine pills for the Script Pavilion’s Chosen Ones. The continents below were nothing but barren, lifeless gray gravel and alkaline dust.
Even worse, across the ten gravel worlds, twenty-five billion exiled citizens—including five billion children—were suffering from endemic Late-Stage Astral Frost-Scurvy. Their gums were bleeding, their bones were brittle, and their meridians were parched from decades of eating nothing but underground lichen and rock-moss in the dark!
