Down where the county dirt road ended and the fresh, oil-black asphalt of Austin’s perimeter access road began, the morning air tore open with a sharp, brassy chime:
*KAAA-CHING!*
A pillar of imperial teleportation light punched through the pine canopy. Runic dragon glyphs swirled through thick clouds of white sandalwood incense. When the blinding golden glare washed away, sixty barefoot men were left standing in the roadside ditch.
At their front stood Emperor Yan Ming.
The absolute ruler of three hundred million souls, commander of eighty thousand royal cultivators, and sovereign master of seventy fertile provinces had left his regalia in the capital. His Nine-Dragon cloth-of-gold robes were gone. His seven-tiered jade crown and dragon-headed scepter of state were locked in the imperial vault.
Instead, Emperor Yan Ming wore the coarse, scratchy, unbleached white hemp robes of a condemned penitent. His long, oiled imperial hair was bound in a simple knot with a fraying piece of hemp twine. His head was bare to the mountain wind. And most humiliating of all to a man whose feet had never touched anything rougher than silk slippers stuffed with goose down, the Son of Heaven was barefoot, his pale royal soles planted directly in the road dust.
Behind him clustered sixty imperial cabinet ministers, Grand Judges of the Celestial Tribunal, and royal ducal uncles. Every last official was draped in the same rough hemp mourning shroud, shivering as the cold mountain grit bit into their bare toes.
"Your... Your Imperial Majesty..." the Prime Minister whimpered, his teeth rattling like loose dice. "Should we truly not summon the Imperial Praetorian Guard? Or at least unfurl the Royal Dragon Banner? To crawl up a provincial dirt path dressed like common grave-diggers awaiting the headsman's blade—"
"Shut your fool mouth!" Emperor Yan Ming hissed back through clenched teeth. His face was gray as wet cement, his pupils blown wide with terror. "Summon guards?! Do you want seventy generations of our imperial line burned to cinder before lunch?! The cosmic entity sitting on this ridge swallowed the Ancient Absolute Zero Cannon—an apocalyptic First Epoch weapon—and used it as an air conditioner for his shop! Then he waved a hand, dropped twelve iron dreadnoughts out of the sky, and locked them to the earth with cursed yellow metal! If we show even a speck of imperial pride, this entire dynasty will be melted down to slag by sundown! We walk on our bare feet, and you will thank the ancestors for every sharp rock that cuts your soles!"
For two brutal hours, the rulers of the Great Yan Dynasty hiked up the twelve-percent-grade switchback on foot.
The road was unforgiving. Austin’s civil grading specs had called for an eight-inch base course of three-quarter-inch crushed basalt, compacted to ninety-eight percent density with a five-ton vibrating roller. For courtiers whose soft feet had known only polished jade and goose-feather rugs, every step was agony. Every minister kept his bruised heels on the dirt; nobody dared channel spiritual qi to float. The heavy, suffocating gravitational drag bleeding down from the summit felt like an invisible slab of iron resting across their necks.
Halfway up the eastern ridge, the imperial procession rounded a hairpin turn and stumbled upon a scene that made several ministers drop to their knees in sheer existential vertigo.
Off on the shoulder, digging an eighteen-inch drainage trench, was Grand Elder Xuan Xiao—the most revered Daoist sage of the Western Mountains, an immortal who hadn't deigned to speak to a mortal emperor in four centuries.
The ancient master was soaked in sweat. He wore an XXL neon-orange mesh safety vest over his pristine white Daoist robes. In his right hand, he held a two-foot aluminum torpedo level against the trench bottom, screaming through a galvanized steel megaphone at thirty terrified disciples:
"Useless dogs! I called for a two-percent grade toward the retention culvert! You dug a one-point-five! If autumn runoff pools against the aggregate sub-base and causes hydraulic frost heaving in January, Master Austin will confiscate our safety goggles and put us on twelve-hour rock-breaking duty! Re-dig the trench! Re-dig it until the bubble rests dead-center between the black lines!"
"The... the Grand Elder of the Ninefold Sky Sect is doing road drainage?!" the Minister of Rites whimpered, hot tears cutting clean tracks through the dust on his cheeks.
"Eyes down and keep walking!" Emperor Yan Ming barked under his breath. "Do not look upon his shame, or he will bury us in that ditch!"
Fifty yards further up the grade, the situation became outright nightmarish.
On the right-hand shoulder, where a new concrete pedestrian sidewalk was being finished, knelt Patriarch Iron Blood. The most ruthless demonic butcher in continental history—a monster whose very name silenced crying babies across three kingdoms—was balanced on two wooden knee boards.
He wore a bright yellow plastic hard hat. His terrifying, razor-sharp Blood Claws, which had gutted ninety righteous sect masters, were stretched out over the gray slurry. But instead of tearing flesh, the demon’s claws were buzzing at three thousand micro-vibrations per minute, skimming lightly across the wet concrete to bring the cement paste to the surface without causing aggregate segregation!
"Trowel from the wrist, you idiot!" Patriarch Iron Blood snarled over his shoulder at a demonic disciple who was sobbing while hauling a five-gallon pail of curing compound. "If I spot a single honeycomb void or trowel ridge along this expansion joint, I’ll peel your hide off and use it for a concrete blanket! Master Austin wants a uniform broom finish with clean chamfered edges! Do you want our crew's safety rating downgraded to Tier 3?!"
"The... the Blood Patriarch is finishing sidewalks..." the Minister of War whispered, clutching his hemp shroud and swaying on bruised feet. "He’s floating concrete cream with his demon claws..."
"Quiet!" Yan Ming hissed, his own knees trembling with terror. "The sovereign of this peak has broken saints and demons alike. He has turned the bloodiest warlords of heaven into a municipal road crew! One wrong word, and we’ll be out here with hand tamps laying hot asphalt until the end of time!"
Gasping, their bare feet cut and bloody from the basalt gravel, the sixty rulers of the Great Yan Empire finally crested the summit of Mount Clear Sky.
They stumbled onto the clean, polished flagstones of the Obsidian Plaza.
Emperor Yan Ming braced himself for judgment. For twelve straight hours, his mind had conjured a nightmare vision of the sovereign: a thousand-foot demon king wrapped in black solar fire, sitting upon a throne of petrified dragon bones, demanding the blood sacrifices of sixty provinces.
The reality was sitting on the porch.
Under the shaded cedar overhang of a modest timber lodge, rocking gently in an unpainted pine rocking chair, was a young man in blue denim dungarees and heavy steel-toed work boots.
He wore a midnight-blue Sovereign Hard Hat tilted comfortably back on his forehead. Pushed above the brim was a pair of dark green arc-welding goggles. In his left hand sat a steaming white ceramic mug of hot jasmine tea. In his right hand was a set of polished brass dial gauges, which he was using to check the wheel-flange tolerances on a miniature brass model of a commuter train bogie resting over a sheet of blue drafting vellum.
Curled across a grease-stained wool moving blanket at his feet, snoring like a rusted chainsaw, was an eight-hundred-pound three-headed black hound. The monster was lazily gnawing on a four-foot splinter of the Emperor’s personal steering helm:
*Chomp... crunch... snore.*
The young man blew gently across the tea, then took a slow, noisy sip:
*Slurp.*
"Ahhh. That’s the stuff. Good jasmine."
Emperor Yan Ming didn't hesitate.
He threw himself forward, dropping to his bruised knees and slamming his forehead straight into the cold obsidian flagstones with a sharp, echoing crack:
*THUD!*
"Your Imperial Humble Servant, Yan Ming! Emperor of the Great Yan Dynasty, Son of Heaven, Ruler of seventy provinces! I have led the imperial cabinet barefoot to kowtow in dust and repentance before the Supreme Master of the Second Sun!"
Behind him, sixty cabinet ministers hurled themselves flat against the stone in synchronized terror:
*THUD! THUD! THUD! THUD! THUD!*
Sixty foreheads struck the flagstones like an executioner’s drum. Weeping, wailing, and gasping for air, the rulers of three hundred million mortals poured out their desperate pleas:
"We have committed unforgivable blasphemy!"
"We disturbed the Master's divine concentration with our clumsy wooden boats!"
"We beg the Lord of the Cosmic Forge to spare our mortal subjects! Burn us as fuel for your furnaces, but do not melt our cities into slag!"
Austin froze.
His brass dial gauge hovered in mid-air, exactly three millimeters above the miniature wheel assembly.
He slowly laid the tool down on the blueprint, reached up, and pulled off his reading spectacles. He pulled a clean blue cotton rag from his overalls pocket, wiped the lenses with slow, deliberate circles, tucked the rag away, set the glasses back on his nose, and peered down over the porch railing at the sea of barefoot men weeping into his flagstones.
Austin blinked. He pushed his hard hat back with the tip of his thumb, his face settling into the familiar, deeply exhausted squint of a contractor dealing with unexpected visitors on a job site:
"Wait a second..." Austin leaned his forearms against the cedar rail. "You're... Yan Ming? The registered title holder for those twelve dreadnoughts parked down in Lot One?"
Emperor Yan Ming kept his nose pressed hard against the cold stone, his thin hemp robes shaking in the wind:
"Yes, Grandmaster! Those twelve miserable tubs belong to the imperial court! We are the guilty parties! We take absolute responsibility for our celestial transgression!"
Austin let out a long, heavy, profoundly relieved sigh. He set his mug down on the rocking chair's wide armrest, grabbed his aluminum clipboard and yellow grease pencil, and rubbed the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger:
"Finally," Austin muttered, shaking his head. "Lord almighty, finally. I’ve been sitting here for two straight hours waiting for somebody from corporate fleet management to show up."
He stood up from the rocker, his steel-toed boots clumping solidly across the cedar decking:
*Clomp.*
He tapped the wooden railing with the corner of his aluminum board:
"Do you have the vessel registration papers, proof of commercial liability coverage, and an approved municipal airspace waiver? Because your admiral managed to rack up six hundred thousand copper in noise violations and impound storage, plus twelve thousand in emergency towing and grounding fees. I can’t authorize Tie Kuang to unbolt the wheel clamps until you clear the paperwork and the registered owner signs the intake manifests."