Midnight settled over Sunset Peak.
The black glass tiles in the entrance plaza gave off the heat they had soaked up during the day. Above the valley clouds, the air smelled of cedar, pine resin, and fresh-cut stone.
Austin sat at his drafting table on the porch of the Tier 2 Timber Lodge. The lamp beneath his midnight-blue Sovereign Hard Hat cast a narrow beam over his plans. He pressed the prongs of his moisture meter into the cedar railing and checked the reading.
Eight point four percent. Dry and fully cured.
He took a drink of lukewarm chicory coffee and grimaced. It tasted awful, but it kept him awake.
An amber-and-red warning flashed across his vision.
Austin lowered his coffee.
“Unbelievable.”
He turned to a fresh sheet of parchment and began checking the numbers. Ninety-nine point nine-eight percent containment sounded impressive until you looked at what was left. Ten terawatts of leaked power. Even a small part of that reaching the mountain as heat would be disastrous.
He looked at the cedar railing he had sanded by hand. Every post was notched, bolted, and finished with three coats of marine tung oil. The windows slid smoothly. The siding was straight. Every joint fit tight.
To Austin, that was five Hoover Dams of raw energy. It would turn the whole lodge to ash. The glass would shatter. The brass hinges would melt. His beautiful black plaza tiles would bubble like tar.
“Some cosmic designer changed the core specs without checking the site,” Austin growled. “Nobody burns down my porch because of bad paperwork.”
He strode to the bronze bell at the corner post and pulled the cord three times.
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
The sound rang across the summit and echoed down the mine shafts.
Under a bench, Cerberus Pug lifted his middle head. He huffed at the noise, then buried all three noses in his paws again.
Twenty seconds later, the freight elevator burst open with a hiss and a clang. Supreme Grand Supervisor Tie Kuang and Southern Sword Saint Jiang Taixu rushed onto the plaza.
Tie Kuang’s orange safety vest flapped around his broad chest. His gear-shaped Golden Core chugged beneath his ribs. Jiang Taixu crossed the plaza at forty miles an hour without spilling a drop from the mug in his hand. A blue carpenter’s pencil rested behind his ear.
“Master Chu!” Tie Kuang shouted. “Did an eighth-tier beast break the fence? Are void locusts eating the solar farm?”
“Worse,” Austin said. “My core is about to ignite. We have seventy-one hours and change before it dumps enough waste heat to cook the mountain.”
Both men stopped.
They knew nothing about nuclear physics, but ignite, cook, and seventy-one hours were clear enough.
Jiang Taixu touched the brim of his hard hat. “Do you mean the ancient sun god in your dantian is breaking free to burn the three thousand worlds?”
“I mean our cooling plan is garbage,” Austin said. He jabbed his pencil at the warning. “The core will jump from two million degrees to five million. The shield holds most of it, but the heat that gets through will still destroy the lodge. It could melt our tools on Floor 1 and boil the groundwater beneath Floors 2 and 3.”
Tie Kuang crushed his clipboard against his chest. “Boil the groundwater? The Pelton wheels! The furnace cooling jackets! If that water turns to steam, every pump seal on the mountain could blow!”
“Now you’re catching up,” Austin said. “We need a serious heat sink, and we need it fast.”
He flipped to a clean sheet and sketched a ring of towers around the Obsidian Plaza.
“Eight eighty-foot Ice-Cold Silver-Steel Radiator Towers. One every forty-five degrees. Each tower gets sixteen banks of finned cooling coils and a fifteen-foot fan on top. We connect them to the underground heat exchangers with a closed loop of coolant.”
He tapped the material list.
“We use the hundred and thirty-five tons of Grade-5 Silver-Steel-Carbide armor we pulled from the Demolition Giants in Vault 04.”
Tie Kuang’s eyes lit up. “I can have all four blast furnaces hot in thirty minutes. We’ll cast the tubes, headers, and frame plates around the clock.”
“Twelve-hour shifts,” Austin said. “Rotate the pour crews. I don’t want anyone dropping into a crucible because they got tired. And speed doesn’t excuse skipped inspections. A fast crew that breaks the line is slower than a careful one.”
He drew several blue lines beneath the plaza.
“Jiang, this is our real problem. Three thousand feet of trench. Four feet deep and three feet wide, straight through solid granite. We need it for the supply and return lines. Our siege golems can lift scrap, but hard-rock digging will burn out their bearings. We don’t have enough people.”
Tie Kuang was quiet for a moment. Then a greasy grin spread across his face.
“Master Chu, have you looked past the valley fence since supper?”
Austin walked to the railing.
Campfires covered the foothills. Silk pavilions, hide tents, and rough shelters crowded twenty miles of road and spilled into the rice fields. Banners from more than three hundred sects snapped in the night wind.
Fifty thousand cultivators sat in the cold mud. Qi Gathering recruits huddled beside white-bearded Golden Core patriarchs. All of them stared up at Sunset Peak with hopeful eyes.
Austin watched them for five seconds.
“What’s that?” he asked. “Woodstock?”
“The three hundred sects of the Southern and Western Reaches,” Tie Kuang said. “They’ve been camped outside our gate since we returned from the rift. Six hundred grand elders and fifty thousand disciples, all begging for a chance to serve you. Some have offered their family treasures. Others say they’d be happy to rake gravel.”
Austin cleaned a speck of sawdust from his safety glasses.
He didn’t see sword saints, blood lords, or ancient hermits. He saw fifty thousand idle workers begging for a job.
“Fifty thousand pairs of hands,” he said. “No union. No prevailing wage. And they’re volunteering.”
His mouth curved into a grin that would have worried any sensible subcontractor.
“Tie Kuang. Jiang Taixu.”
“Yes, Master Chu!”
“Bring the spare safety vests and glasses to the lower gate. Set up a folding table, sharpen twenty pencils, and print trade applications.”
Austin fastened his hard hat.
“Shift starts at first light. We’re holding open tryouts for trenching subcontractors.”