Twelve hours remained.
Xuan Xiao’s crew had lifted the return line, removed the loose ridge, and rebuilt the gravel bed to grade. Iron Blood’s people had replaced the gasket and reset every valve on Tower 4. Austin had watched their measurements, not their faces, before releasing the containment brake.
The repaired loop passed at quarter load, half load, then full load. Coolant returned cold from all eight towers. Neither crew lead cheered. They signed their own inspection sheets and went back to work.
The delay had cost them half a day. The purple tribulation clouds had formed a low black ceiling over Sunset Peak. Midday felt like an eclipse. The pressure made every breath an effort, and a steady electrical hum vibrated through the mountain.
Static clung to every edge.
On the lower terraces, a young sword disciple named Li Xiaoyao brushed his knuckle against a wooden rail. A blue spark jumped with a sharp crack.
He half drew his practice sword, then shoved it back into its sheath with a yelp. The steel hummed like an angry hornet, and violet light crawled from the pommel to the guard. Every breath tasted like copper.
Two disciples beside him leaned on their steel spades. Sparks immediately jumped between the rivets on their orange vests.
“The Heavenly Dao has marked our flesh!” one wailed. “The sky fire is reaching for our bones!”
Fifty thousand cultivators huddled beneath wet tarps. Patriarchs who had ruled whole provinces sat in the mud clutching jade charms. Some wrapped themselves in wool blankets, hoping to shield their spirit veins. Younger disciples chanted funeral prayers while thunder shook the terraces.
On the summit, nobody had time to pray.
CLANG-RUMBLE-CLANG!
The freight hoist rose from Floor 2 and opened with a burst of compressed air. Twelve massive copper-alloy rods rested in timber cradles on the platform.
Each was one hundred feet long and four inches thick. The foundry crews had polished the shafts and shaped one end into a sharp point.
Austin waited in the center of the plaza with his Sovereign Hard Hat strapped down. A welding shield rested on his forehead, and graphite powder dusted his leather gloves. At his feet sat a graphite Cadweld mold, steel retaining discs, and sealed canisters of thermite powder.
“Jiang Taixu! Take rods one through eight. Mount them on the tower apex trusses. Grade-eight stainless U-bolts, double nuts, lock washers, a hundred and fifty foot-pounds. Don’t guess. Wait for the torque wrench to click.”
“Understood, Master Chu!” Jiang put his carpenter’s pencil between his teeth and picked up an eight-hundred-pound rod with one arm.
He used the Nine Heavens Wind-Stepping Art and leaped onto Tower 1.
Two seconds later, he reached the top. Before tightening a single nut, he used a thread of sword intent to check that the rod was perfectly vertical.
“Plumb!” he shouted.
His pneumatic torque wrench rattled until its clutch clicked.
CREAK-CLANG! CLICK!
One by one, all eight cooling towers gained hundred-foot copper spires. Their points rose twenty feet above the fan housings and aimed into the storm.
The last four rods went to the lodge and the battery yard. Two were bolted to the lodge’s ridge beams. The other two went onto the steel masts beside the capacitor enclosure.
Next came the grounding cable.
“Tie Kuang, bring the come-along and help me move this spool.”
Together they wrestled three thousand feet of five-hundred-MCM bare copper cable across the plaza. The braid was as thick as a man’s wrist and built to carry enormous surge currents.
Austin laid the cable through the gravel-bedded trenches. At Tower 1, he pressed it against the steel base plate and closed a graphite mold around the joint.
Tie Kuang leaned closer. “Why use that mold? A couple of brass lugs would save twenty minutes.”
“Mechanical lugs leave tiny gaps,” Austin said. “Damp air corrodes the connection. Then two hundred thousand amps hits that resistance and blows the lug apart. An exothermic weld melts the copper into the joint. No gaps. No loose threads. Permanent bond.”
He placed a steel disc in the mold, added the copper-oxide powder, and dusted the rim with starting powder. Then he lowered his face shield and struck the igniter.
FZZZZZT-FLASH!
A four-thousand-degree reaction flared inside the mold. Molten copper fused the cable and base plate into a single joint. Smoke rose through the vents, sharp with hot metal and flux.
Austin waited ten seconds, opened the clamps, and knocked away the brittle slag with his boot.
Tink.
A clean copper weld shone underneath.
“That’s how you build a ground loop,” he said.
Tie Kuang dragged the cable toward him. “Master Chu, all twelve rods are connected to the perimeter ring. Where do we drive the earth rod? Should we send the heavenly wrath down to Floor 4?”
Austin stared at him. “Throw away all that power? Do you know what electricity costs?”
Tie Kuang blinked. “You aren’t grounding it into the bedrock?”
“Why would I waste five hundred megavolts of usable power? I harvested lightning with a bamboo pole and six black glass boxes when this place was a woodshed. Now we have a real battery bank.”
He pointed to the chain-link enclosure on the western rim.
Inside stood Sunset Peak’s 2.5-Gigawatt-Hour Solar-Crystal Capacitor Grid. Forty steel cabinets hummed behind ceramic insulators.
“Run the main conductor through the high-voltage vacuum breakers and connect it to the charging bus. A storm like this will throw thousands of strikes at those rods. We fill the capacitor bank, then use the power for the ore sorters, furnaces, and my porch heat. Six months of free electricity.”
Tie Kuang froze.
On Tower 8, Jiang Taixu nearly dropped his wrench.
The Heavenly Dao had sent an extinction-level tribulation to destroy the mountain. Austin had responded by building a giant lightning collector to charge his batteries.
Tie Kuang’s Golden Core spun faster.
“The Dao of Energy Harvesting!” he cried. “The sacred art of stealing power from Heaven!”
He hauled the main conductor into the battery yard and bolted it to the distribution terminal.
CLACK-SNAP!
Austin connected his ground-resistance tester to the monitoring terminal. Green text appeared.
“Point one one eight ohms,” Austin said. “The code accepts anything under five. Under point two is excellent. Let the storm do its worst.”
He wiped graphite dust from his cheek and checked the timer.
Twelve hours of hoisting, bolting, and welding had used the last of their time. The countdown had reached thirty seconds.
[CORE IGNITION COUNTDOWN: 00:00:29...]
[CORE IGNITION COUNTDOWN: 00:00:28...]
Around Austin’s legs, his one hundred and ninety-six orbiting micro-fragments began to spin faster.
VZZZZZZZZZZT!
Black glass shards, copper pellets, and silver-steel filings blurred into rings. Their high-pitched whine made the porch boards vibrate.
Deep in his dantian, the two-million-degree stellar crucible reached its limit. Outward heat pressure could no longer resist the pull of gravity. The dense hydrogen shell collapsed toward the center of his soul.
Austin planted his boots and took a slow breath.
“Ten seconds.”
3... 2... 1...
00:00:00.