Sakaar's sky looked like a carelessly stirred palette.
Beneath its rust-red canopy, the blue-green glow of the Star Stream Layer drifted overhead, tracing sharply defined contours.
Thousands of plumes of volcanic ash billowed up from the planet's surface. The unusual composition of the terrain made them brilliantly colored, and together they created a sky as chaotic and disorderly as Sakaar itself.
No one knew how many routes led into Sakaar from the universe beyond, just as no one knew which route could take them back out.
The seven largest spatial routes were controlled by Sakaar's major gangs. They were the paths most often used by outsiders to exile and dump criminals, and, aside from the scrap heaps, the only remaining resources on Sakaar that its inhabitants could fight over.
Here, "people"—especially powerful, vicious life-forms from every corner of the universe—were more precious than anything else on the planet.
So guarding the entrances to the routes and capturing slaves was the fastest way to "get rich" on this planet.
The energy detector, obviously cobbled together from different models and even different materials, crackled with blue light. Its hemispherical field covered a radius of more than twenty kilometers, and aside from Kardletz himself, there wasn't a trace of life.
A lone "scavenger" like him had no chance of claiming an entrance to one of the lucrative, reliable routes. All he could do was try his luck around the countless remote "fish holes."
If he came across a spaceship or starship that had fallen in because of a temporal riptide or a malfunction during a space jump, then he'd landed himself a "big fish," as scavengers called them!
He might even leap straight up to the rank of "hunter."
Thump!
It sounded like a Koldo Beast hide drum pounding on Contest Carnival Day.