At 12:30 AM, inside the ten-mile-wide biosphere bubble of Dormitory #404, the courtyard grass had been cleared to make room for the largest overnight manufacturing project in the history of Sector 7.
Nobody in the Gu household was sleeping.
Under the bright golden floodlights of the [Flying Courtyard Star-Cruiser], all five children, Empress Luo Qingxue, Grandpa Fu, Auntie Qin, and Grandpa Yao were operating at peak family-workshop efficiency!
On the left side of the courtyard, a row of twenty giant solar-fire rotisserie ovens was spinning at full blast. Eleven-year-old Jiang Tuntun (wearing her Chief Taste-Tester dinosaur bib), ten-year-old Su Nuannuan. Auntie Qin were basting five thousand plump, golden-skinned Spirit-Feather Roosters with a secret glaze of wild honey, star-anise, cinnamon bark, clove, fennel, and Ten-Thousand-Year Soul-Mending Ginseng Broth!
“Brush the wings twice so the skin gets extra crispy, Sister Nuannuan!” Tuntun directed with solemn culinary authority, holding a giant basting brush in both hands while drooling into her bib and heroically resisting the urge to eat the inventory. “Grandpa Yao said his ten thousand grandpa friends haven’t eaten a single drumstick in three hundred years! If the chicken skin isn’t crunchy when they wake up, it’ll be an emergency!”
“Don’t worry, Sister Tuntun! Nuannuan added three drops of Sovereign Honey-Dew to every barrel so even a grandpa without teeth can chew the bones!”
