As Austin and Tie Kuang descended the spiral steel catwalk between Floor 2 and Floor 3, the bedrock around them began to sing with a deep, subsonic resonance.
The vibration did not feel like an earthquake. It was a rhythmic, harmonic thrumming that made the galvanized handrails tingle against Austin’s leather work gloves and set the fluorescent fixture housings vibrating at high frequency.
The energetic discharge of one thousand high-level cultivators clearing ore chutes and raking molten slag had acted like a colossal geothermal induction coil. By furiously channeling their sword qi, kinetic palm strikes, and solar arrays through the metal infrastructure of Floor 1 and Floor 2, the crusaders had unintentionally pumped terawatt-hours of residual kinetic and spiritual energy through the mountain’s copper grounding grid.
Every kilowatt of that vast current had been collected by the subterranean copper bus-bars and routed straight into the 2.5-gigawatt-hour primary capacitor bank.
And the capacitor bank, already sitting at one hundred percent maximum rated capacity, had vented its immense electrical surplus along the heavy four-aught distribution cables directly into Austin’s abdominal solar core.
Inside his dantian, the Sol-Class Golden Core responded with a violent, majestic surge of stellar nucleosynthesis.
*VUUUUUUUUUMMMMMMMMM...*
The vibration bypassed hearing altogether, humming straight through Austin’s marrow and the surrounding space-time continuum.
Austin halted abruptly on the corrugated steel landing. His knuckles tightened around the knurled grip of his five-foot Stellar-Steel pipe wrench as blinding golden light began to bleed through the heavy twill seams of his blue flannel work shirt and work overalls. The fabric of his clothes cast sharp, knife-like shadows against the damp granite cavern wall.
In his retinas, the familiar green system HUD flared with urgent, cascading golden alphanumeric banners:
*CREEEAAAK.*
The four-inch steel I-beam supporting the catwalk landing groaned under sudden, tremendous stress. The structural steel dipped visibly by a quarter of an inch beneath the soles of Austin’s steel-toed work boots as his localized gravitational field abruptly spiked to 35.0 gravities.
"Whoa there," Austin grunted, bending his knees slightly to absorb the sudden load.
His personal perceived body weight had jumped by another seventy pounds. To someone without proper ergonomics, that kind of sudden axial load would have crushed a man's lumbar vertebrae like dry chalk.
Beside him, Tie Kuang let out a strangled gasp and dropped flat onto his hands and knees.
The invisible 35G gravity gradient radiating from Austin’s core pressed down upon the dwarven master artificer’s spine like an entire collapsed mine shaft. Even with his advanced Foundation Realm cultivation and natural dwarven bone density, Tie Kuang found himself pinned against the diamond-plate decking, gasping for air as the air was forced from his lungs.
"Master... Master Austin..." Tie Kuang wheezed through clenched teeth, his thick safety glasses sliding down his sweat-sheened nose. "The... the gravitational gradient... it’s bending the light around your shins! My beard... it feels like it weighs eighty pounds!"
"Hang on, Tie Kuang. Give me two seconds," Austin said calmly.
With practiced, mechanical economy of motion, Austin reached down to his heavy modular tool belt. He unclipped two standard 50-pound lead ballast slugs from the reinforced canvas side pouches, tossing them aside with a dull, heavy *THUD* that shook the catwalk.
Reaching into his spatial storage ring, he pulled out a pair of custom-cast 75-pound lead counterweight ingots—poured with integrated quick-release carabiner clips and precision balance grooves.
He clicked the heavy ingots into place on his hip harness, grabbed the ratcheting nylon retaining straps, and gave them three crisp, sharp pulls:
*CHCK-CHCK-CHCK.*
The straps cinched tight against his thighs, bringing his total worn ballast to precisely five hundred pounds.
With the five-hundred-pound ballast counterweight properly distributed across his hips and pelvis, Austin’s internal center of gravity realigned with the expanded 35G field. The downward torque on his lower back vanished instantly, and his posture straightened back into effortless, relaxed alignment.
Austin rolled his shoulders, exhaling a long breath of superheated air that shimmered faintly with iridescent golden heat before dissolving against the cool cavern air.
"There we go," Austin said, tapping his belt buckle. "Center of mass calibrated to within zero-point-five millimeters. Tie Kuang, you alright down there? Let me dial back the external gravity leakage."
Austin consciously willed the magnetic containment mesh around his abdominal core to tighten. The crushing gravitational shear radiating into the stairwell receded like an ebbing tide, reducing the ambient load back to a normal, manageable one-and-a-half gravities.
Tie Kuang sucked in a massive, ragged lungful of air, trembling violently as he pushed himself up from the steel deck. He leaned heavily against the catwalk railing, his face pale and his knuckles white:
"By the Ancestors... Master Austin. For five heartbeats, I felt as if the entire Western Province had been stacked atop my neck. My ribs were creaking!"
"Sorry about that," Austin apologized, tapping the catwalk I-beam with the steel toe of his boot. "The system kicked my internal core temperature over ten million Kelvin. Two exawatts of continuous output. The thermal expansion pushed the gravitational field out by three full gravities before the magnetic containment mesh could compensate. I’ll need Jiang Taixu to weld additional web stiffeners under these Floor Three catwalks before we run any heavy electric forklifts across them."
Tie Kuang stared at him, his mouth opening and closing like a landed trout. "Ten... ten million Kelvin? Two... exawatts?"
Austin wasn't listening to the numbers; he was glancing upward through the massive six-foot ventilation risers that cut through the mountain’s ceiling.
Even four hundred feet beneath solid granite, Austin could feel the energetic reflection of what was currently happening high above Sunset Peak.
Out in the mortal world, the sky had fundamentally transformed.
The Second Sun—the miniature golden star anchored high above Austin’s mountain—had suddenly flared with majestic, terrifying brilliance. The central golden sphere contracted slightly, its surface condensing into a blinding, pure-white furnace of ancient fusion.
Surrounding the star, a radiant, crystalline halo blossomed outward—a True Solar Corona spanning sixty leagues across the firmament.
Millions of thin, luminous coronal streamers stretched across the sky like the shimmering petals of an eternal celestial lotus. They danced in majestic, silent loops along the star’s magnetic field lines, bathing the entire Great Yan Empire—and the neighboring Iron Peak, Frost Sea, and Southern Cloud Empires—in a tranquil, warm golden luminescence.
Across four empires, mortal commoners dropped their farming tools and fell to their knees in the dirt, weeping in awe as the divine light washed over their fields, causing winter crops to bud with unnatural vigor.
In the imperial capital of the Great Yan Empire, two thousand miles away, the Grand Astrological Observatory was thrown into absolute, screaming pandemonium.
Ancient bronze armillary spheres—instruments that had remained stationary for eight centuries—began spinning on their gimbals with terrifying velocity, whistling like screaming tea kettles. Crystal scrying lenses cracked from thermal stress. Dozens of imperial court astrologers and Golden Core diviners collapsed to the marble floor, clawing at their robes in religious terror:
"The firmament has shifted!" the Chief Imperial Astrologer screamed, his white beard trembling as he pointed a quivering telescope toward the eastern horizon. "The True Solar Corona has bloomed! No mortal artifact could do this! No illusion could burn this bright! A True Solar Sovereign has ascended to the throne of heaven! The cosmic balance of the continent has been rewritten!"
Deep within secluded mountain grottos, ancient Nascent Soul patriarchs who had slept in meditation for a thousand years suddenly snapped their eyes open, coughing up mouthfuls of turbid blood as their spiritual senses were scorched by the sheer, unbridled majesty of the ten-million-Kelvin corona.
Back on Sunset Peak, four hundred feet underground, the "Solar Sovereign" was completely uninterested in cosmic balance.
Austin pulled his yellow grease pencil from his hard hat harness, leaned his aluminum clipboard against the catwalk handrail, and squinted at the new schematics flashing across his HUD:
*Tier 6 Induction Smelters* and *True Coronal Streamer Manipulation*.
"Continuous vacuum-arc remelting units with automated slag separation..." Austin murmured to himself, his eyes glittering with pure builder’s joy. "Tie Kuang, look at this schematic. Do you know what this means?"
Tie Kuang, still rubbing his bruised knees, leaned over to look at the glowing holographic line-drawings projecting from Austin’s pupils:
"What does it mean, Master Austin? Does it allow us to forge divine spirit swords that can cleave the heavens?"
"Screw spirit swords," Austin scoffed, tapping the drawing with his pencil. "It means we can cast seamless Grade-6 titanium turbine blades without micro-porosity defects! Zero voids! Zero grain boundary cracking! We can build high-pressure multistage steam turbines and run them at thirty thousand RPM!"
Tie Kuang blinked, his brow knotting in confusion. "Turbines?"
"Yes! Turbines!" Austin grinned, his teeth flashing in the golden light bleeding from his collar. "We route the superheated steam from the primary radiator cooling loops directly into the turbine housing. That gives us another five hundred megawatts of auxiliary base power! Clean, continuous electricity! Free power for the entire complex! We can electrify the underground railway all the way to the quarry!"
Tie Kuang stared at Austin, his mind reeling as he tried to reconcile the cosmic phenomenon currently shaking four mortal empires with the man standing before him in grease-stained overalls.
"Master Austin..." Tie Kuang whispered, his voice cracking. "The Second Sun just bloomed with a sixty-league True Solar Corona. The astrological observatories across four nations are probably having collective heart attacks right now. Patriarchs are coughing blood in their caves. And you... you achieved the Ten-Million-Kelvin Divine Corona... just so you could run bigger power drills?!"
"And angle grinders," Austin corrected firmly, tapping his grease pencil against the dwarven smith’s shoulder. "Don't ever forget the nine-inch heavy-duty angle grinders, Tie Kuang. You can never have too much torque on a cutting disc. You try grinding Grade-5 titanium billet bevels with a four-inch hobbyist grinder and see how fast you burn out the armature."
Austin tucked his pencil back into his hard hat harness and gave his modular tool belt a satisfied pat, testing the weight of the five-hundred-pound lead ballast. The balance was immaculate.
"Alright, that's enough lollygagging. The crusaders cleared Floor One and Floor Two faster than expected, which means they should be hitting the Floor Three cryogenic airlock right about now. Let's go down to the observation deck. I want to make sure none of those holy warriors do something stupid around the liquid nitrogen loops."