High noon shone down from the ten artificial mini-suns of Commercial Planet #12, bathing the grand marble plaza outside the Hundred-Sun Treasure Pavilion in warm, golden light.
For the first time in three centuries, the streets of the planetary capital were not silent or boarded up.
Hundreds of thousands of local shopkeepers, herb-growers, mortal weavers, and family smiths had poured out of their homes, filling the wide boulevards with cheering crowds, waving red silk banners. Setting off celebratory firecrackers as Grandpa Fu’s automated PTA cargo drones rained floating golden refund envelopes back into every single robbed shop along the avenue!
At the foot of the pavilion’s grand obsidian staircase, a wooden spectator fence had been erected around the front steps, where a live educational exhibit was currently underway.
Wearing matching bright-yellow compulsory debtor aprons, former Auction Director Jin and former Professor Ao Man were down on their hands and knees on the marble stairs. Welded to their hands were two stiff straw brooms and two buckets of Auntie Qin’s lemon-scented disinfectant soap. Their arms moved at a mandatory two hundred scrubs per minute as they scrubbed every last trace of three-thousand-year-old donkey manure off the stone steps!
“Scrub harder on the left corner, Brother Jin!” Sophomore Boss Long Batian called out cheerfully from behind the fence, holding a clipboard as a volunteer student sanitation monitor while chewing on a discounted sesame pancake. “Teaching Assistant Ye Xiao says if you miss a single speck of donkey fiber, your daily debt reduction…
