On the bow of the Sun-Slayer, the twenty-foot barrel of the ancient cannon turned toward Mount Clear Sky.
CREAK. CREAK.
Ninety royal formation masters knelt around the flagship’s power core. They pressed their palms to silver glyphs in the brass deck and poured their cultivation into the firing array.
“Wake, ancient frost of the void! Extinguish the false light!”
The Ancient Dark-Ice Absolute Zero Cannon was the Great Yan Dynasty’s ultimate weapon of conquest.
Its core had come from a comet that had drifted through deep space for three million years. Royal artisans had hollowed out the comet’s heart and built a weapon around its unnatural cold.
The beam stripped heat from whatever it touched. Atoms stopped moving. Stone, steel, flesh, and spiritual energy became brittle and still.
Three hundred years earlier, twelve demonic sects had fortified the Great Boiling Marsh of Pingxi. One shot from the Sun-Slayer had frozen sixty square miles of magma in four seconds. Eight hundred thousand warriors had crumbled into gray dust.
Now the same weapon aimed at Austin.
The temperature around the flagship’s bow plunged.
HISSSSSS.
Blue frost spread across the Cold-Iron hull. Icicles formed along the cannon barrel. The ship’s own metal contracted so fast that rivets popped from the forward deck.
BANG! PING!
Ice crawled up the rigging and encased the royal flag. Blue arcs snapped between the cannon’s electrodes.
BZZZZZT—TARGET LOCKED.
Turquoise crosshairs settled on Austin’s midnight-blue hard hat.
On the porch, Jiang Taixu dropped his plans.
“The First Epoch comet core,” he gasped. “Grand Senior, run! That weapon extinguishes the flame of life itself! At Pingxi, even the souls of Golden Core masters shattered!”
Tie Kuang ducked behind a pallet of steel beams and pulled out a heavy safety blanket.
“Master Chu, the tower thermometers are dropping past forty below! Steel gets brittle at those temperatures! If that beam hits your tool belt, it will shatter like peanut brittle!”
Li Xiaoyao ran down the porch steps with his wooden practice sword.
“Grand Senior, move! Get behind the tower shielding! Wood won’t help against that!”
Austin stayed in the center of the plaza, his pipe wrench resting on one shoulder.
He tapped the brim of his hard hat and pulled his Shade-14 goggles into place.
The system stripped away the weapon’s grand title and showed him a badly insulated cooling system. Frost covered the valves. Cold vapor leaked from loose seals.
“Look at that ice around the fittings,” he said. “No proper insulation. Half the coolant is boiling off before it reaches the barrel. Amateur garage plumbing.”
Then he checked his own core.
His Sol-Class Golden Core had burned at five million degrees since ignition. The eight radiator towers had been rejecting its waste heat without pause. Towers 3 and 4 were pinned at ninety-two percent heat duty. Austin had been dreading the chore of climbing their catwalks to rebalance the valves by hand.
He rolled his shoulders.
“Actually, your timing isn’t bad.”
On the bridge, Grand Admiral Meng raised his sword and chopped it down.
“FIRE! EXTINGUISH HIS LIGHT FOREVER!”
KAAAAAA-BOOOOOOM!
The flagship kicked backward. The recoil tore three bronze winch towers from their mounts and knocked seventy marines off their feet.
A three-foot-wide beam of black frost burst from the cannon.
It swallowed the light along its path. Moisture and gases in the air froze into hard pellets that rained across the terraces.
Patter-patter-crack!
The air itself seemed to crack like glass in a crusher.
“GRAND SENIOR!” Li Xiaoyao screamed.
Fifty thousand cultivators covered their faces.
“The Absolute Zero Cannon has struck!”
“Nothing survives the ancient void!”
Austin planted his boots and took a steady breath.
BOOOOOOM!
The black beam struck him square in the chest.
There was no fire. A wave of subzero frost exploded outward. Black ice covered the plaza tiles forty feet around him. Frost raced up Tower 1 and froze its drain valves.
Around Austin, the discharge hardened into a fifty-foot dome of solid black ice.
The dome swallowed him, his hard hat, his tool belt, and his pipe wrench. It stood in the middle of the plaza like a tomb made from darkness.
Every bird on the southern ridges fell silent.
On the flagship, Meng gripped the rail and burst into wild laughter.
“WITNESS THE WRATH OF GREAT YAN! A COMMON PLUMBER DARED QUESTION THE EMPEROR! NOW HIS SOUL IS FROZEN, AND HIS BODY IS A MONUMENT TO IMPERIAL OBEDIENCE!”
The formation masters raised their sleeves.
“Long live the Emperor! Long live Grand Admiral Meng!”
“The false sun will be out before nightfall!”
Below, fifty thousand workers stared at the black dome in horror.
Inside it, Austin stood comfortably in the dark.
The terrible cold rolled off the walls in lazy waves. Then it met the five-million-degree fusion fire in his dantian. The containment mesh drew in the cold, easing the pressure that had been building in his core for hours.
For the first time since ignition, the heat inside him felt balanced.
A small, contented smile crossed his face.
A sound drifted from deep within the frozen dome. It was followed by the hiss of escaping vapor, like the door of a walk-in cooler opening on a hot August afternoon.
Then Austin spoke. His voice was relaxed and clear.
“Oh, man...”
He sighed with deep satisfaction.
“That’s refreshing.”