Through his Shade-14 goggles, Austin opened the full report on his Level 50 breakthrough.
The unstable crucible of his Foundation Establishment stage was gone. In its place floated a white-hot sphere of stellar matter: a true Sol-Class Golden Core.
This was no jade pebble or cloud of spiritual mist. An active, self-sustaining star now burned inside his dantian.
The system magnified its surface. Cells of hydrogen and helium churned like boiling honey. Loops of plasma rose from its edge, held in place by the First Epoch Containment Mesh. The silver web was the only thing between Sunset Peak and an unimaginable disaster.
Austin opened the master status sheet.
Austin whistled.
“Five hundred quadrillion watts. That’s not a character stat. That’s a planetary power supply.”
Earth’s entire electrical grid averaged about three terawatts. His new core produced more than a hundred thousand times that.
“Back home, this could run every steel mill, power every city, and desalinate half the ocean. Here, a cultivator gets this much power and uses it to throw a bigger purple lightning bolt at a cliff. Then he sits on a rock for three hundred years. The waste makes my teeth itch.”
He scrolled to the technology reward.
Tier 5 High-Speed Industrial Maglev Rail
- Linear synchronous guideways with regenerative braking - Superconducting magnetic suspension - Evacuated transit tubes - Fifty-ton freight cars - Automated switching and routing controls
Austin leaned forward in his rocking chair.
“A real freight network. Finally.”
The local transport system offended him. Merchants spent months moving copper by oxcart and lost cargo to broken axles, mud, and bandits. Flying swords were worse. They carried one person, burned expensive spirit stones, and offered no protection from weather. One sneeze at three thousand feet could drop a crate through a farmhouse roof.
He traced the guideway plans with his pencil.
“Lay rails along the highway. Put the trains inside sealed concrete tubes and pump out the air. Forty-car trains at six hundred miles an hour. Five hundred tons of Stellar-Steel from Sunset Peak to Canglan Citadel in forty-five minutes.”
He imagined standardized freight containers arriving on a reliable schedule while automated cranes loaded ore into storage silos.
“No more oxen. No more pack mules. No more sword cultivators charging sixty gold coins to balance a sack of barley on a blade. We’re bringing freight timetables to this empire whether it wants them or not.”
He closed the blueprint and stood to test his new body.
The cedar boards groaned under his boots.
Austin froze.
His containment mesh kept the core’s gravity from swallowing the mountain, but the area within two meters of his body now carried twenty-five times normal gravity. Even his own balance had changed. The new core sat slightly higher than the old one, and at twenty-five G, that tiny shift was enough to pull him forward.
He had been through similar problems at Levels 40 and 45. This time, he did not complain. He went to his rucksack and found four fifty-pound lead weights.
Two went into the rear of his tool belt. Two went into pockets on the back of his thighs.
Clack. Clack.
With four hundred pounds of ballast in place, his hips settled into alignment and his back stopped straining.
“Fifty more pounds every bracket. At this rate, I’ll be carrying a pickup truck by the next tier.”
He wrote on his clipboard and underlined it twice.
BALLAST IS TEMPORARY. DESIGN A REAL FIX.
Then he took three steps. The boards stayed quiet.
Around his shins, two hundred and eighty fragments spun in five nested rings. Black glass, ball bearings, broken bolt heads, copper beads, and star-gold moved so fast they blurred into golden bands.
Austin checked the gap between the inner ring and his boot with a pocket ruler.
Sixteen thousandths of an inch.
“One thousandth over minimum clearance. Won’t chew up my laces or cuffs. Good enough.”
Quick footsteps sounded on the porch stairs.
“Grand Senior! Look what happened!”
Li Xiaoyao ran onto the porch, struggling to carry a golden fruit the size of a medicine ball. It weighed at least thirty pounds and smelled of honey and ripe nectar. Warm spiritual mist pulsed beneath its translucent skin.
Austin raised an eyebrow.
“What are you hauling onto my porch? Did a giant cantaloupe fall off a wagon?”
“No, Grand Senior!” Xiaoyao dropped to his knees and lifted the fruit. “It came from the wild bitter peach tree on the eastern cliff! The moment your new sun lit the sky, the dead tree came back to life!”