Relying on weather for industrial power was a rookie mistake.
Austin stood in the middle of Subterranean Floor 1, wiping black mineral grease from his knuckles with an oily rag. Overhead, the quartz lamps burned with clean violet light, fed by the six obsidian capacitors up on the surface plateau. Two point five gigawatt-hours of captured lightning was a respectable battery reserve, but thunderstorms were pure weather RNG.
If the region hit a two-month summer drought, the capacitors would bleed dry. The smelters would cool down, the pneumatic chisel would freeze up, and the entire production schedule would collapse into dead ticks.
A proper processing yard needed base-load power. Relentless, continuous, twenty-four-seven kinetic torque that spun regardless of whether the sky was spitting lightning or baking clear blue.
Austin shoved his grease rag into his apron pocket and walked to the western wall of the Cobalt Labyrinth.
He pressed his ear against the cold, unyielding basalt.
*RUMBLE-RUSH... RUMBLE-RUSH.*
Behind twelve feet of solid rock, a subterranean torrent hammered through the dark. Austin tapped his temple, calling up the hydrologic scan:
"Eighteen point five meters of head at four-fifty a second," Austin muttered, calculating the numbers in his head. "Figure eighty percent efficiency on a split-bucket impulse wheel. That’s sixty-five to seventy kilowatts of steady shaft power. Plenty to run the primary bus."
He unclipped the High-Frequency Thermal Plasma Pickaxe and thumbed the ignition dial.
For forty-five minutes, Austin chewed through the western rock, driving a three-meter-wide intake sluice into the wall at a thirty-degree slope.
He didn't leave the sluice with ragged granite walls. Austin swept the fifty-thousand-degree plasma blade down the length of the channel, vitrifying the rock into a seamless flume of mirror-smooth volcanic glass.
"Laminar flow," Austin said, running his calloused palm down the glassy trough. "Zero fluid friction. Keep the boundary layer clean, and you don't lose ten percent of your dynamic head to turbulence."
Next came the discharge. Four hundred and fifty liters of water every second had to go somewhere, or Floor 1 would turn into an underground swimming pool in ten minutes flat. Austin dropped to the lower end of the raceway and carved a deep, sloped drainage canal straight down into a natural rock fissure. Over the opening, he bolted a heavy iron grating to keep large debris from choking the return sump.
Then came the runner. Using seasoned Dragon-Vein Pine planks from the surface woodpile, Austin framed out a fifteen-foot timber waterwheel.
Instead of flat river-mill paddles, he hand-carved twenty-four contoured Pelton buckets. Each bucket featured a split double-cup with a central knife-edge splitter designed to divide the incoming water jet and turn it through a clean hundred-and-sixty-degree arc. He faced the leading edge of every wooden cup with scrap iron strips to resist cavitation pitting.
Down the center went a six-inch drive shaft turned from pure Azure-Dragon Spirit Iron. The shaft sat in greased bronze pillow-block bearings, linked through stepped wooden reduction gears to a heavy copper-wound induction dynamo bolted to the floor.
Before letting water anywhere near the wheel, Austin gave the runner a hand spin to check the dynamic balance. The wheel wobbled slightly at three o'clock. Austin reached into his apron, grabbed two strips of lead flashing, and tacked them to the rim opposite the heavy spoke with iron brads. He spun it again. The wheel coasted to a stop with zero pendulum shudder.
"Balanced true," Austin grunted.
He checked the gear mesh with his feeler gauge, grabbed a six-foot iron pry bar, and jammed the tip beneath the rock retention bulkhead holding back the subterranean river.
"Hydroelectric commission: cycle one," Austin called out. "Clear the tailrace."
He threw his full weight onto the bar.
*CRACK-WHOOSH!*
The granite partition sheared free.
A roaring, pressurized wall of ice-cold river water erupted into the intake flume. The jet blasted down the glassy race at thirty miles an hour, slamming into the Pelton cups with the fury of a burst dam!
*CREAK-HUMMMMMMMMMMMMM!*
The fifteen-foot timber wheel groaned, shuddered under the hydraulic impact, and began to spin.
Within seconds, the wheel locked into a smooth sixty RPM. The Azure-Dragon iron shaft rotated silently in its bronze bushings, the wooden reduction gears clicked with rhythmic precision, and the copper dynamo wound up into a high-pitched electromagnetic whine.
Sapphire light flared through the copper coils as continuous base-load current flooded the distribution blocks.
Austin leaned against the safety rail, arms folded across his hemp apron, watching the blue light wash over the spinning timber wheel.
"Clean kinetic torque," Austin said, satisfied. "Zero fuel burn. No weather RNG. The shop can run day and night."
***
Thirty yards upstream, where the diversion channel cut through an ancient geological fault, the surging current ripped through the crumbling stone wall of a forgotten burial vault.
The vault held the sealed tomb of **Patriarch Blood-Thirst**—a demonic Nascent Soul slaughterer from the First Epoch. Sealed inside a coffin of dark corpse-iron, the old terror had slept in a suspended death-trance for two thousand years, clutching his soul-eating medallion while waiting for the stars to align so he could rise and drain seventy thousand cultivators dry.
The diverted river battered his rusted coffin to pieces against the cavern floor.
*SPLOOSH-CLATTER.*
Along with white foam, river gravel, and torn water-weeds, a dried, shriveled, leather-skinned mummy was spit out of the drainage sluice.
Wrapped in tattered, rotted black burial silks and bearing a verdigris-crusted bronze skull medallion around its neck, the ancient patriarch tumbled helplessly down the glassy race. It struck the waterwheel’s timber splash-shield with a hollow *thump*, flew through the air, and landed squarely in Austin’s scrap hopper.
*CLATTER.*
Austin blinked.
He shoved his safety goggles to his brow and walked over to the collection box, staring down at the withered black corpse tangled in wet river gravel.
A faint, sickly crimson miasma sputtered from the mummy's dried snout. The skull medallion on its breastbone flickered with weak, spiteful crimson malice, trying to summon an ancient curse of endless damnation.
Austin tilted his head. The HUD scanned the pile:
Austin’s eyes widened. A grin split his face.
"Bone meal!" Austin exclaimed, clapping his hands together. "Slow-release organic soil amendment! Just what the surface carrot beds needed. That mountain terrace soil is way too sandy and acidic; it’s starving for calcium and organic phosphates."
He reached down, hooked two fingers through the rotten cord of the cursed skull medallion, and yanked it off the mummy's neck with a sharp jerk.
He didn't bother studying the screaming runes carved into the bronze. He tossed the artifact into a bucket marked `[MISC COPPER SCRAP]` with a light *CLINK*.
"Twelve percent copper," Austin muttered. "Every ounce counts. Melts down into pipe fittings."
Then, Austin grabbed the two-thousand-year-old Demonic Nascent Soul Patriarch by his dried, leathery ankles.
Hoisting the ancient butcher of seventy thousand souls over his shoulder like a bundle of dry firewood, Austin marched across the obsidian floor toward a heavy, hand-cranked grain grinder bolted to the north wall. The rig was a rugged piece of machinery he’d built from two circular basalt millstones with iron-faced teeth, originally intended for cracked corn.
Austin hooked a clean burlap sack under the discharge spout.
Then, without batting an eye, he jammed Patriarch Blood-Thirst head-first into the feed hopper.
Austin grabbed the iron crank handle, dug his straw sandals into the floor, and leaned into the swing.
*CRUNCH-CRUNCH-CRUNCH.*
The basalt teeth bit into the petrified skeleton. The ancient demon’s dried ribs and hip joints cracked into coarse grit with dry, heavy thuds.
The sputtering death-qi screamed once in the void and vanished, snuffed out by sixty kilograms of turning basalt.
*CRUNCH-SCRAPE-CRUNCH.*
A steady stream of fine, odorless white flour poured from the spout, filling the burlap sack below.
In three minutes flat, the ancient terror of the Southern Provinces was reduced to ten pounds of high-grade, calcium-rich bone meal.
Austin tied the sack with a length of rough twine, swung it onto his shoulder, and gave the burlap an approving pat.
"Ten pounds of bone meal," Austin said, grinning through the rock dust on his nose. "Natural calcium and phosphorus. The carrots and bell peppers are going to take off with this."
***
Ten yards away, frozen at the base of the spiral stairs.
Li Xiaoyao stood clutching his iron clipboard to his ribs like a shield, his knuckles white as chalk, his broom trembling against his shins.
He had walked down the steps to hand over his hourly tally of sixty-four-block stacks, only to witness the entire butcher's performance.
He had seen the intake flume vomit the mummified demon into the light.
He had recognized the blood-skull emblem on the rotting silks. Every novice in the Southern Cloud mountains had to recite the ancient steles of the Great Yan Dynasty: the dreaded sigil of **Patriarch Blood-Thirst**, the legendary monster who had slaughtered whole sects during the First Epoch.
And he had watched Austin casually rip the patriarch’s cursed soul-relic away, toss it into a scrap bin like a bent nail, and feed the ancient demonic supreme elder into a grain mill to make carrot fertilizer.
Xiaoyao’s knees rattled against each other: *tat-tat-tat-tat.*
Tears of cold, suffocating terror filled the boy's eyes. His dantian spun like a top on the edge of a cliff.
*The... The Blood-Thirst Demon Patriarch...* Xiaoyao wept inwardly, his breath catching in his throat. *An ancient slaughterer whose name made empires tremble... washed into the Master's cellar... and ground into dust for the garden...*
He stared at Austin, who was cheerfully whistling while wiping rock dust off the mill’s hopper teeth.
A profound, world-altering realization slammed into Xiaoyao’s soul.
*The Dao of Recycling!* Xiaoyao breathed, trembling from head to foot. *This is the Master's true, ultimate Heavenly Way! In His eyes, there is no righteousness, no wickedness, no immortals, and no demons! All things under heaven—whether a righteous immortal or a blood-soaked devil—are merely base resources to be sorted, milled, and returned to production! Even the most vile butcher of the First Epoch must submit to becoming compost for the Master's carrots!*
Xiaoyao dropped slowly to his knees, pressing his forehead against the cold iron of his clipboard, weeping in sacred terror.
"Disciple sees the truth," the boy sobbed softly into the stone. "The Master's mercy has no end... He has granted the demonic patriarch redemption through agricultural utility!"