Two thousand miles of the Northern Imperial Highway were getting torn apart, graded flat, and reassembled in titanium, pre-stressed concrete, and crushed trap rock.
Fifty thousand sect cultivators—drawn from three hundred rival schools, blood clans, and reclusive mountain hermitages—moved along the easement with the relentless cadence of a factory floor. Every last one of them wore full Sunset Peak jobsite PPE: neon-orange breakaway vests, yellow fiberglass hard hats, steel-toed work boots, and wrap-around green safety spectacles.
Leading the civil grading crew two feet above the fresh ditch line was Grand Elder Xuan Xiao of the Ninefold Sky Sect.
His Peak Golden Core spiritual sense, once reserved for meditating on celestial Dao patterns, was pinned entirely to a grade stake. Beside him, Framing Subcontractor Jiang Taixu squinted through an optical laser transit on a surveyor's tripod, checking tangents down a five-mile stretch of dirt. Xuan Xiao clutched a yellow megaphone, barking into the microphone until the speaker cracked:
"Watch that crown! Sub-base tolerance is plus or minus one millimeter! And check the slope on the drainage ditch—three-to-one grade on the side cuts! If spring runoff ponds against this sub-grade because someone got sloppy with a spade, Master Austin will have every elder sifting five hundred tons of crushed basalt through kitchen colanders! Keep that roadbed dead-level!"
Right behind the grading crew came Patriarch Iron Blood. The dreaded demonic warlord had five hundred inner-court disciples down on rolling timber knee boards. Instead of flaying righteous cultivators, their feared Blood Claws were vibrating at three thousand cycles a minute against the pre-stressed concrete ties:
*BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT-THUMP!* *BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT-THUMP!*
The high-frequency pneumatic buzz packed the concrete ties deep into the crushed basalt ballast, knocking out air pockets and preventing aggregate separation. Five million concrete ties were laid, squared, and bedded across two thousand miles in seventy-two hours flat.
Up above the tree line, Grand Admiral Meng's twelve impounded void dreadnoughts were finally earning their keep. Stripped of their heavy plasma cannons, the eighty-thousand-ton battleships hovered low in the valley fog, their belly winches rigged with twelve-part braided steel wire rope. Under Meng’s hoarse bellowing from the bridge, the sky-ships served as heavy aerial cranes, lowering ninety-foot pre-cast concrete bridge bents and viaduct deck sections onto poured granite footings with millimeter precision.
"Taglines tight on the south end!" Meng roared through a shipboard hailing horn. "Guide it down easy! If you crack that prestressed tendon against a pier cap, Master Austin will boot our skids until the next dynasty!"
Down in the subterranean belly of Mount Clear Sky, Floor 2 was running wide open.
The five hundred tons of Grade-5 Star-Iron Titanium hauled in by the imperial reparations treaty were fed directly into twin fifty-megawatt electric arc furnaces under Tie Kuang's watchful glare. In the white-hot belly of the foundry, the molten alloy was continuously cast into seamless superconducting linear guideway sections. Apprentice smiths checked every foot of coil insulation with digital megohmmeters before the twenty-ton freight hoist hauled stacked rail segments up to the surface in endless silvery bundles.
Out on the mainline, Austin ran the lead track crew with his **Tier 4 Industrial Pneumatic Riveting Cannon & Ultrasonic Induction Welder**.
*CHUNK-CHUNK-CHUNK-ZZZZZZT!*
Blinding flashes of blue-white light lit up the mountain cuts as Austin fused the rail segments into an unbroken ribbon of silver-black titanium alloy. Zero expansion gaps. Zero cold-welds. The dual guideways leaped across granite gaps on pre-cast concrete viaducts, shot straight through ancient peaks inside laser-bored tunnels, and traced the valley contours with surgical precision.
Down in the assembly yard beside the Obsidian Plaza, Austin's Level 55 capstone project rested on its staging cradles:
**The Sunset Express**.
Fifty meters of mirror-polished Tier 4 Stellar-Steel formed a three-car, streamlined aerodynamic bullet train. The nose had been modeled inside Austin’s system CAD suite, sculpted with a narrow, aggressive wedge designed to punch through high-speed air resistance without shedding a single kilowatt to turbulent drag.
Mounted under the belly of each carriage were superconducting magnetic levitation bogies, designed to hover four inches off the titanium rail on high-strength magnetic repulsion fields.
Inside, the passenger cabin smelled like fresh lumber and clean leather: hand-planed aromatic cedar wall panels, high-back bucket seats with pneumatic lumbar bladders, recessed cove lighting, and double-paned quartz panoramic viewports. Conditioned air, piped up from the Floor 3 aquifer heat sinks, kept the cabin at a steady, comfortable seventy-two degrees.
Austin clumped down the aisle in his heavy work boots, grabbing an overhead luggage rack and giving it a hard downward jerk:
*Clack.*
"Mounting brackets solid. Zero play," Austin announced. "Boarding is open. Mind the gap."
Emperor Yan Ming, the Prime Minister, and Li Xiaoyao shuffled up the boarding ramp with their mouths half-open.
The Emperor froze right at the rubber threshold. He stared down at his bare feet, then at the cedar planking inside:
"Master Austin... should... should we remove our shoes before setting foot upon the celestial chariot? Is this an altar of the heavens?"
"Leave your boots on, Your Majesty," Austin said, rolling his eyes as he walked past toward the engineer's cab. "Or better yet, slip on those orange rubber safety clogs Jiang Taixu handed you at the turnstile. Bare feet on a transit line are an OSHA violation waiting to happen. If an emergency brake dumps and you break a toe against a seat pedestal, I'm the one who has to fill out the paperwork."
Yan Ming quickly jammed his feet into the orange foam clogs and edged into a leather bucket seat like a man sitting on a primed landmine. Li Xiaoyao ran a thumb over the automated sliding doors, marvelling at the rubber weather-stripping, while the Emperor stared up at the dark digital speedometer mounted above the forward vestibule door.
"Master Austin... does this silver serpent... require neither eight-winged thunder rocs to drag it, nor forty thousand high-grade spirit stones burned in sacrificial firepits?"
"It's a commercial mag-lev train, Your Majesty," Austin explained, settling into the contoured operator's seat and resting both hands on the aluminum throttle levers. "It's driven by linear synchronous induction stators built right into the track bed, powered directly from our base grid. No rail friction, no axle bearings to seize up, and regenerative electrodynamic braking that feeds electricity back into the line when we slow down. We don't need magic birds. We run on three-phase alternating current and Maxwell's equations."
Cerberus Pug trotted into the lounge car, his three stubby tails spinning like boat propellers. He scrambled up onto a wide leather bench, spun twice, and pressed all three broad black muzzles flat against the cool quartz window:
*Snort, snort, snort!*
Austin grabbed the main propulsion lever:
"Hang on to your tea mugs. Bringing up the levitation field."
He notched the lever forward one stop:
*CLACK.*
*HUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.*
A low, rich bass hum resonated through the frame. The forty-ton train lifted four inches off the maintenance blocks. It hung suspended in mid-air, floating on an invisible magnetic cushion in dead, eerie silence.
The Prime Minister gripped his armrests until his knuckles turned bone-white:
"We are airborne! Forty tons of solid steel floating without a single levitation rune!"
Austin didn't waste time talking. He leaned into the throttle, shoving the handle forward to seventy percent:
*WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH!*
The *Sunset Express* jumped.
No grinding steel wheels. No screeching flanges. No bone-shaking rumble through the floorboards. Just a heavy, relentless, velvet-smooth press of electromagnetic acceleration pinning the Emperor and his ministers deep into their cushions.
Through the tinted quartz windows, the valley scenery blurred into streaks of green and gold:
*Speed: 150 MPH...* *Speed: 320 MPH...* *Speed: 480 MPH...*
The imperial ministers gasped for breath, eyes glued to the speedometer as the digital numbers ticked upward without a shudder. Within sixty seconds, the luminous digits locked steady at **Six Hundred and Fifty Miles Per Hour (650 MPH)**.
Outside, the mountain ridges turned into emerald ribbons.
Rough mountain passes that normally cost imperial messengers two weeks of bone-grinding, horse-killing travel flashed behind them in eight minutes.
Roaring river canyons that used to demand three days on a wooden ferry or a terrifying crawl across a rope suspension bridge whipped under the train's concrete spans in forty seconds flat.
Up above, the warm amber light of the Level 55 Second Sun washed over the silver guideway, the train slicing through the atmosphere like a razor through paper.
Emperor Yan Ming pulled an ornate brass water clock from his sleeve, checked the level, and stared out at the clouds whipping past. A tear slipped down his cheek:
"Six hundred and fifty miles per hour..." he whispered, his voice trembling with deep religious awe. "A journey of six months... an ordeal that has drowned entire battalions and starved supply trains... traversed before my morning tea has cooled in the cup..."
The Emperor turned toward the open cab door, bowing low:
"The Master Contractor has woven space and time into a single ribbon of silver. This is not mortal craft. This is the supreme Dao of Infinite Traversal!"
Austin glanced down at his instrument panel, taking a calm sip of hot jasmine tea from his stainless travel mug. On the flat console beside the throttle, a small glass beaker filled to the very brim with water sat dead-still. The surface stayed glassy calm, even as forty tons of steel rocketed through the province at blistering speed.
"Clean track alignment," Austin said with a satisfied grin. "Zero wobble on the wheel bogies. On old steel-on-steel rail, high speeds make the wheel flanges hunt back and forth like a busted shopping cart with a crooked wheel. But when you float on magnetic fields and damp sideways drift with eddy currents, you kill all that shake. Ride is smooth as oiled glass."
Two hours and forty minutes after pulling out of the Obsidian Plaza at Mount Clear Sky, an automated chime sounded overhead:
*DING-DONG.*
The train engaged regenerative braking. The linear stators reversed magnetic polarity, soaking kinetic energy out of the train and dumping it back into the electrical grid:
*Wuuuuurrrrr-pssssssh.*
The deceleration was as smooth as silk. The *Sunset Express* slid to a gentle, motionless stop alongside the freshly poured titanium terminal platform sitting squarely outside the Great Meridian Gate of the Imperial Capital.
Outside the quartz windows, more than five hundred thousand imperial citizens—merchants, scholars, city guards, and high nobles—stood jammed onto the city walls and plaza steps. Palace scribes were running around in circles with ink brushes, frantically scribbling notes and calculating travel times that broke every rule of celestial geometry. The crowd stood dead silent for three heartbeats, staring at the gleaming silver bullet that had arrived without draft beasts, smoke, or flapping sails, before erupting into a roaring wall of cheers that rattled the palace roofs.
Austin checked his digital wristwatch and tapped the face with the dull end of his yellow grease pencil:
"Two hours and forty minutes, mountain ridge to palace front door. Commute problem handled. Now that's what I call delivering ahead of schedule."