Seven days after the fall of Silas Kane, the heavy-duty scar of Mining Rig Omega had been fully erased, replaced by the beating heart of an independent underground great realm: the Underground Iron Haven.
Where yellow sulfuric steam and skin-burning chemical tailings once choked the fiery volcano bowl, the air was now fresh, cool, and clean.
Under the tireless direction of Old Thomas and Toby Mallow, forty commoner building teams had fully re-engineered the work-yard’s main public works. The illegal, high-hum sound fracture drills had been dismantled and melted down into load-bearing steel beams. It had fractured the dark rock crust and poisoned the underground water bed.
In their place, three massive earth-heat turbogenerators had been anchored to the steadied mantle vents.
Driven by white-hot, non-toxic steam controlled by Damper Four, the turbines spun with a smooth, rhythmic hum that powered the entire complex, generating twelve megawatts of clean spark power. Strands of bright blazing bright bulbs and buzzing white work lights lit up the eighty-meter stone cathedral, turning the once-gloomy refinery into a brilliant, bustling underground metropolis.
The most massive transformation, however, was occurring in the main discharge chimney pipes.
The four massive corrugated steel pipelines that had once dumped thousands of tons of untreated petrochemical sludge into the river channels had been thoroughly scrubbed, sandblasted. Then he lined with food-grade epoxy resin. Toby had engineered a multi-stage baked-clay straining array across the intake nexus. He used crushed river-jade silicates and porous dark rock membranes to purify the natural…
