At the heart of the hollow Earth hovered a tiny sun, which currently illuminated the world with the light of noon. The sun’s luminosity changed continuously in a twenty-four-hour cycle, from its maximum to total darkness, providing the hollow Earth with alternating day and night. On suitable nights, it even gave off cold moonlight. But the light came from a single point; there was no round, full moon to be seen.

Of the three people on the yacht, two of them were not, in fact, people. One was a dinosaur named Bigtooth. The yacht swayed and tilted with every shift of his ten-meter-tall body, to the annoyance of the one reciting poetry at the boat’s prow. This was a thin, wiry old man, garbed in the loose, archaic robes of the Tang Dynasty, whose snow-white hair and snow-white whiskers flowed in the wind as one. He resembled a bold calligraphy character splashed in the space between sea and sky.

This was the creator of the new world, the great poet Li Bai.

THE GIFT

The matter began ten years ago, when the Devouring Empire completed its two-century-long pillage of the solar system. The dinosaurs from Earth’s ancient past departed for Cygnus in their ring-shaped world fifty thousand kilometers in diameter, leaving the sun behind them. The Devouring Empire took 1.2 billion humans with them as well, to be raised as livestock. But as the ring world approached the orbit of Saturn, it suddenly began to decelerate, before, incredibly, returning along its earlier route to the inner reaches of the solar system.

One ring-world week after the Devouring Empire began its return, the emissary Bigtooth piloted away from the ring in his spaceship shaped like an old boiler, a human named Yi Yi in his pocket.

“You’re going to be a present!” Bigtooth told Yi Yi, eyes on the black void outside the window port. His booming voice rattled Yi Yi’s bones.

“For whom?” Yi Yi threw his head back and shouted from the pocket. From the opening, he could see the dinosaur’s lower jaw, like a boulder jutting out from the top of a giant cliff.

“You’ll be given to a god! A god came to the solar system. That’s why the Empire is returning.”

“A real god?”

“Their kind controls unimaginable technology. They’ve transformed into beings of pure energy, and can instantaneously jump from one side of the Milky Way to the other. They’re gods, all right. If we can get just a hundredth of their ultra-advanced technology, the Devouring Empire will have a bright future ahead. We’re entering the final step of this important mission. You need to get the god to like you!”

“Why did you pick me? My meat is very low-grade,” said Yi Yi. He was in his thirties. Next to the tender, pale-fleshed humans cultivated with so much care by the Devouring Empire, he appeared rather old and world-worn.