Outside the bronze gates of the Forbidden Ancestral Tomb, watching the live feed of the cobweb-covered wooden shed projected across the 100,000 Galactic Sky-Screens. Ten million outer-rim branch elders and billions of ordinary mortal citizens across the Galactic Capital wiped tears from their cheeks.
“Look at that little ten-by-ten pine shed... look at the hand-carved mortise-and-tenon joints on the rafters...”
Old Elder Gu Zhong of Old-Root Star knelt outside the threshold of the shed with his forehead pressed to the flagstones, his white beard trembling as he sobbed aloud.
“Those are the exact same mortise-and-tenon carpentry joints that our thirty-six branch planets have passed down in our village workshops for a hundred thousand years! First Founder Gu Mu never built a golden throne for himself. Even after he ascended to the peak of the galaxy and carved the Ten-Thousand-Star Shelter Array to protect humanity from cosmic beasts.
He still lived in a plain pine workshop and wore patched carpenter’s overalls! And after Butler Gu Gui poisoned his direct grandsons eighty thousand years ago, those ungrateful beasts threw the Founder’s spirit tablet into the dirt behind the ash dumpsters!”
Up on the tribunal dais outside, however, Corrupt Patriarch Gu Tianba saw that Gu Changsheng hadn’t gone after the tomb’s treasure vaults at all. Had instead walked into that rotten, spiritually dead wooden shed at the back of the mountain!
