Her Celestial Farm on the Scrapyard Planet novel Chapter 348

Chapter 348 What Claire Cost Them

Finished

Every person in that room carried damage. That was simply the reality of operating at their level for as long as they had. Years of high-stakes decisions, constant interstellar transit, and the accumulated stress and radiation exposure that came with building and maintaining empires.

And in every one of their families, at least one person was dealing with something worse than the baseline. A son, a spouse, a sibling-struggling with something that money and position hadn’t been able to fix.

The farm’s produce had quietly stopped being an interesting rumor. For the people sitting around this table, it had become something closer to a strategic asset. The kind of resource that could extend a political career, stabilize a family’s next generation, or simply make the difference between a person’s last years being livable or not.

They’d been positioning for it. NovaSea Transport had infrastructure and established relationships. Getting ahead of the line, securing some kind of preferential access before the farm’s reputation grew any further, had seemed not just possible but likely.

Claire had ended that before it began. They weren’t going to get preferential access. They weren’t going to get any access. Blacklisted, permanently, along with everyone connected to them, by a farmer on a waste planet who hadn’t blinked doing it.

It wasn’t an exaggeration to say the bottom had dropped out.

Richard sat at the table with his face the color of old charcoal. He was furious about the company. He was more furious about himself, about the private hope he’d been quietly nursing for months that Claire’s visit might, in some unofficial capacity, yield something he could actually use.

Richard was just past 70. In the interstellar era, with its extended lifespans and the resources available to people of his standing, that wasn’t particularly old.

But he’d built NovaSea Transport from nothing, fighting for position in shipping lanes that weren’t safe or stable, and his mental power had paid the price.

The damage had been accumulating for years. Headaches that came without warning. Episodes of disorientation. A temper he could no longer fully trust.

He’d tried everything. Gene therapy compounds, stabilization equipment, and specialists who charged enough to fund small planetary operations. Nothing held. Some of it had made things worse.

He’d almost given up. He’d been preparing himself quietly, for an old age spent in pain with the slow terrifying loss of his own mind.

Then the Planet A001 farm exploded onto Starnet, and with it came a wave of firsthand accounts that were too specific and too consistent to dismiss. Something shifted in him that he’d stopped allowing.

Natural food that could heal mental power damage. If it was real. If even half of it was true.

When the company voted to send an assessment team, he pushed through the opposition and insisted

Claire lead it.

He trusted her, she was his favorite, and he had a private reason he hadn’t shared with anyone. He wanted

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Chapter 348 What Claire Cost Them

Fraished

her to use her position to bring something back. Anything. Something he could try himself and verify with his own body.

He’d pulled her aside before she left and told her directly. “Keep your temper down. We’re going there to build a relationship, not to throw our weight around. Elizabeth isn’t someone to take lightly. The Hewitts respect her, and you will too. Whatever happens, come home with something. A strawberry. A cucumber. It doesn’t matter. This is about my health. This is about this family’s future.”

He hadn’t calculated for the possibility that his daughter, who had grown up getting everything she wanted and had never once been made to sit with a real consequence, would encounter a child whose face reminded her of something she hadn’t forgiven, and detonate.

A mistress. An illegitimate child. To Richard, that category of problem was beneath serious consideration. You handled it and moved on. Claire had apparently not moved on. She’d let it blow up in public, on someone else’s property, in front of people who mattered, and drag the entire company down with her into permanent, irrevocable ruin.

Useless girl. Fool. The words tore through him silently, and his mental field lurched with the force of it, a dull blade turning behind his eyes, his vision graying at the edges. He clenched his jaw and held on.

Claire, meanwhile, was somewhere in the upper atmosphere in her private cabin, watching jump-light streak across the viewport, the worst of the rage slowly draining out of her and leaving something colder behind.

Adrian Clarke was beside her, pulling at her sleeve. “Mom. I want the strawberries. And those shiny grapes. When are we going back? You said they had loads of good stuff.”

“Shut up!” Claire was already at her wits’ end. Richard’s parting words kept replaying in her head. Be careful. Keep the peace. Your priority is samples and making a first contact. Measured against everything she’d actually done today, a slow burn of self-recrimination crept in.

She’d completely lost her head over that little bastard.

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