Subterranean Floor 1 hummed at ninety-eight point four percent mechanical efficiency. Austin leaned a hip against the maple workbench, crossed his arms over his canvas apron, and took in the steady, deep-throated drone. Pure job-site serenity.
Down in the southern drift gallery, three eight-foot Earth-Drill Scaly Pangolins plodded along the basalt haul tracks. Austin had christened them Digger One, Digger Two, and Chonker. Cutting those guide grooves into the bedrock with his rotary saw had cost two days of sweat, but it paid off. No wandering. No stuck wheels. Zero lost loads.
He had rigged each beast with a custom draft harness: cured ox-hide breastplates lined with horsehair felt, bronze draft bars, and wide leather traces pinned to low-slung timber dump carts. Every fifteen minutes, right on the mark, Digger One or Digger Two backed a cart square against the active muck face. Young Li Xiaoyao, sweating through his disciple tunic, shoveled twenty blue-veined chunks of Azure-Dragon Spirit Iron over the sideboards. The pangolin would grunt, dig heavy claws into the grooved stone, and trot down the central haulage drift to dump its payload straight into the primary intake hopper of the Stellar-Induction Blast Furnace.
*Chitter-snort.*
A heavy, diamond-scaled snout bumped Austin’s left thigh, nearly knocking a set of brass feeler gauges off the bench.
Chonker.
The animal was shaped like an armored propane tank on four bowed legs, easily carrying three hundred pounds more blubber and plating than his shift-mates. He planted his broad shovel snout against Austin’s apron, wheezing happily through flared nostrils and begging for a mid-shift handout. His thick tail thumped against the obsidian floor tiles: *thump, thump, thump.* Stone dust puffed up with every beat.
Austin reached into his leather nail pouch with a tired chuckle. "You're shameless, you know that? Your brothers are still humping muck at the face, and here you are panhandling for snacks."
Chonker gave a high-pitched, pathetic whistle, nudging Austin’s hip with enough force to shove him back half a step.
"Alright, hold your horses."
Austin pulled out a blackened, golf-ball-sized clump of roasted basalt slag, still radiating faint solar heat from the furnace taphole. He tossed it underhand.
Chonker snapped his jaws shut with a ringing *CRUNCH*. The beast chewed the molten mineral clinker like peanut brittle, letting out a deep, vibrating purr that buzzed straight through Austin's boot leather.
"Good boy," Austin said, patting the armored plates between the beast's ears. "Zero fuel burn, biological steering, no dead batteries, and you don't leak hydraulic fluid across my clean walkways. Best mount patch update this game ever rolled out. If Caterpillar built haulers that ran on furnace clinker and affection, half the equipment mechanics in the state would be drawing unemployment."
At the center of Floor 1, the induction furnace thrummed with its steady, low-frequency pulse: *WUB-WUB-WUB.*
Raw iron ore plunged into the quartz crucible at sixteen hundred degrees Celsius, washed through Austin’s directed plasma stream, and flowed out as glowing, iridescent blue billets of Tier 4 **Stellar-Steel**.
The smelt was flawless. The transport was the headache.
Humping twenty-pound billets up ninety spiraling stone steps by hand was an absolute backbreaker. It killed productivity, wrecked knees, and was an emergency room visit waiting to happen.
So Austin had automated it.
He'd fired up his High-Frequency Thermal Plasma Pickaxe, dialed the focal cone to a five-foot bore, and burned a clean vertical shaft straight through the roof of Floor 1. Fifty meters dead vertical through the granite guts of Sunset Peak, punching out directly through the floorboards of the cedar tool shed behind his surface cabin.
Inside that chase, he hung a mechanized **Vertical Bucket Elevator**: an endless loop of tempered steel roller chain running on cast sprockets, driven by a bevel-gear power takeoff spliced into the Pelton waterwheel turbine. Twenty pressed-bronze scoops dug into the subterranean sorting hopper and hoisted cooled billets topside at a steady three feet per second.
Austin had enclosed the entire shaft in sheet-metal guards and fitted a brass shear pin to the primary drive sprocket. If an ingot snagged in the chute, the pin popped before the shaft warped or the chain snapped. Simple preventative maintenance.
*Clack-clack-clack... THUD.*
Topside, inside the cedar tool shed, another freshly forged blue billet dropped neatly into a heavy iron bin with a satisfying metallic clunk.
Austin climbed the spiral stairs to verify the delivery tally.
Li Xiaoyao stood stiff in the center of the shed, staring at the continuous stream of glowing billets with wide, horrified eyes. His knuckles were bone-white on the handle of a push broom, and his knees knocked together beneath his robes like dice in a cup.
"Senior Austin," Li Xiaoyao stammered, voice trembling. "The... the delivery speed is terrifying. The shed holds four hundred billets of Heavenly Star-Iron already. Each billet radiates an aura of such dense celestial authority that the cedar shingles are sweating purple resin, and spiritual orchids are taking root in the wall joints!"
"Standard batch output," Austin said, wiping mineral grease from his knuckles with a shop rag. He pointed his yellow pencil toward a battered five-gallon wooden bucket parked smack in the walkway between the workbench and the door. It was heaped to the brim with curling blue lathe turnings, sharp swarf from the milling vise, and fine slag filings left over from pipe threading and wrench knurling. "More importantly, that pail of scrap is cluttering the gangway. Walkway clearance is under twenty-four inches. Textbook tripping hazard."
"The... machining scrap?" Li Xiaoyao asked, lower lip quivering.
"Yeah. Metal filings. Slag shavings," Austin said, consulting the clipboard tucked under his arm. "Haul it down to the sect village or flag down whatever itinerant tinker works the lower valley road. Flog it for scrap. Two copper coins, five coppers—whatever clears the floor. If nobody wants it, tip it into the gravel ruts by the outer gate to level out the wagon ruts. The delivery carts keep bottoming out in the mud."
Li Xiaoyao stared down into the wooden bucket.
To Austin, it was scrap metal—swarf, chip waste, floor sweepings. But in Xiaoyao's spiritual sight, every microscopic curl was an indivisible sliver of Tier 4 Stellar-Steel—forged at fifty-five thousand Kelvin, washed in solar plasma, and knit tight with the living marrow of an ancient dragon. The aura off the shavings alone made his scalp prickle and his teeth ache.
"Sell it... for copper coins, Senior?" Xiaoyao choked out, his vocal cords vibrating with terror.
"Sure. Five coppers sounds fair for a five-gallon pail of unwashed iron dust," Austin replied casually, heading back toward the cellar door. "Buy yourself some candied hawthorn berries or a sweet bun with the proceeds. I'm going back down to snug the conveyor belt tensioners. Don't let that collection bin overflow."
***
Thirty minutes later.
Clear Sky Sect, Grand Council Hall.
Sect Master Gu Qing was halfway through a cup of bitter chrysanthemum tea, attempting to steady his nerves after the morning's rhythmic underground tremors, when Li Xiaoyao burst through the grand double doors.
The sixteen-year-old disciple hauled the wooden bucket in both arms, treating it with the frantic reverence of a man carrying an unshielded lightning tribulation. With his heel, Xiaoyao kicked the heavy rosewood doors shut, whipped three yellow silence talismans from his sleeve, and slapped them across the doorframe with desperate palms.
"Sect Master!" Li Xiaoyao gasped, dropping to his knees on the carpet, chest heaving. "Look! LOOK!"
Gu Qing set his porcelain teacup down with mild, paternal patience. "Calm yourself, Xiaoyao. What has the Ancestor produced now? Another cart of oversized spiritual peaches? Or did his waterwheel leak into the cabbage patch? What could possibly—"
Gu Qing glanced down into the open wooden bucket.
*CRACK.*
The delicate porcelain teacup shattered into powder in Gu Qing’s grip.
Scalding tea and crushed celadon glaze splashed across his pristine ceremonial silk robes, but the Sect Master didn't flinch. He stood up so violently his heavy rosewood chair flipped backward, crashing against the rear wall into matchwood!
"Is that...?" Gu Qing lunged across the desk like a starving wolf, his trembling fingers plunging into the sparkling blue dust.
The moment his skin grazed a single microscopic spiral of metal, an ear-splitting, primal draconic roar detonated inside his sea of consciousness!
A wave of pure thermonuclear heat and unyielding, diamond-shattering hardness surged through his meridian channels, causing his Golden Core to spin like a runaway flywheel!
"Great Dao Above..." Elder Song stumbled into the hall, drawn by the raw spiritual pressure bleeding through the walls. His jaw dropped slack, and his snowy beard bristled with blue static electricity, every wire-thin hair standing on end as he stared at the bucket. "What is this divine dust?! A single speck of this material possesses the structural inertia and hardness of an Earth-Grade divine artifact!"
"The Ancestor called it 'machining scrap,'" Li Xiaoyao whispered in hushed, trembling terror. "He said it was cluttering his gangway. He told me to flog the entire bucket for five copper coins to buy candied hawthorns... or dump it into the road ruts down by the outer gate to level out the wagon potholes!"
Gu Qing grabbed Li Xiaoyao by both shoulders, shaking the young disciple until his teeth clattered like castanets:
"Dump it in potholes?!" Gu Qing screamed, his refined baritone cracking into an undignified, hysterical falsetto. "If a single grain of this Star-Marrow dust touches a mortal blacksmith’s forge, it can temper three hundred common iron blades into High-Rank Spirit Swords! A single thimbleful of this dust could buy three merchant galleons in the provincial capital! He wanted to dump it in the mud?!"
Gu Qing took three deep, ragged breaths, clutching his chest to keep his Golden Core from detonating from pure shock. His eyes burned with frantic, feverish calculation.
"Elder Song!" Gu Qing roared. "Summon the Grand Elder of the Treasury! Bring the diamond-tipped balance scales! Divide this bucket into one-grain increments! Pack each grain into sealed, velvet-lined red-sandalwood pill boxes! Dispatch ten boxes immediately to the Canglan Provincial Border Trade Fair as a secret auction lot! Announce to the nine provinces that the Clear Sky Sect has opened a spiritual metallurgy trade line!"
***
Three days later.
The Canglan Provincial Border Trade Fair was engulfed in absolute, screaming pandemonium.
Grand trading cartels from five provinces, royal emissaries from imperial martial academies, and ancient peak Golden Core grandmasters fought like rabid dogs over the ten velvet-lined wooden boxes. When the auction master demonstrated that a single microscopic blue shaving could split a four-thousand-year-old Cold-Iron anvil in half without suffering a scratch, bidding wars descended into near-bloodshed!
A single grain of Austin’s lathe shavings sold for thirty-four thousand High-Grade Spirit Stones.
When the final gavel struck down on the tenth box, the Clear Sky Sect had amassed over four hundred thousand High-Grade Spirit Stones—more liquid wealth than the sect’s gross income over the past three centuries combined!
Back in the Clear Sky Sect treasury, stone storage vaults groaned under the literal mountain of glowing blue spirit stones. The structural timber floorboards bowed downward under the sheer gravitational weight of the sect’s newfound fortune. Gu Qing sat on the vault steps, weeping softly into his sleeves from pure, dizzy relief.
Meanwhile, sitting at his subterranean wooden drafting desk on Floor 1, Austin glanced at his system interface.
Austin smiled with deep, genuine satisfaction. He reached into his bib pocket and jingled the twelve copper coins with his thumb.
"See? Twelve coppers," Austin muttered to Chonker, who was happily snoozing beside his boots. "Always sell your scrap drops. Passive income adds up. Never leave vendor trash cluttering your floor."
Suddenly, the basalt floor beneath Austin’s sandals gave a savage lurch.
Not the Pelton runner's steady hum or the rhythmic clatter of the bucket elevator chain. A deep, bone-crushing vibration resonated through fifty meters of solid granite, rattling the wrenches on the wall rack.
Far above, from the mountain passes leading toward Sunset Peak, a sound like rolling thunder rumbled across the sky—accompanied by the deafening blast of five hundred heavy war horns!
Austin stopped. He pulled out his brass pocket watch and popped the lid with his thumb.
"Two in the afternoon," Austin grumbled, looking toward the ceiling. "If some county road crew is blasting rock without giving forty-eight hours of prior public notice, I am marching up there with a clipboard and filing a formal complaint."