Warm, golden-pink Honey-Ginger Spirit Rain drifted down over the ancient cobblestone plaza of Branch Planet #1 (Old-Root Star) as the [Galactic Flying Courtyard] settled gently beside the newly planted hundred-foot brass soup tower.
All around the square, millions of freed branch villagers—men, women. Children who had just watched fourteen-year-old Gu Nian and his siblings disarm the entire First Sector Harvesting Armada in three minutes flat—stood cheering and weeping under the fragrant rain.
At the edge of the plaza, outside a humble mud-brick cottage whose roof beams had been patched with scrap wood for nine millennia. Nine-thousand-year-old Branch Elder Gu Zhong knelt beside his broken kitchen stove, clutching a heavy, fireproof black-iron box to his sunken chest.
Across his hollowed-out sockets ran two crisscrossed black burn scars that still smoked faintly with residual main-clan curse energy.
“Grandpa Zhong!”
Seventy-year-old Village Head Gu Tie, who had ridden over from System #36 on the courtyard’s rear deck alongside fifteen-year-old Gu Hu and little Gu Xiaomei. Hurried down the wooden steps to steady the frail nine-thousand-year-old elder.
“Little Tie... is that your voice?” blind Elder Gu Zhong whispered, his gnarled, sawdust-stained fingers trembling as he felt the warm, dragon-marrow vitality radiating off fifteen-year-old Gu Hu beside them.
