High above the mist-hung valley, on the sunlit terrace of Sunset Peak, Austin tapped his yellow grease pencil against the edge of his wooden clipboard. The morning breeze carried the clean pine scent of the upper ridge, undercut by the foul reek rising from the draw below: sulfurous coal smoke, scorched animal tallow, and burning gear oil.
Austin grimaced. He wiped graphite dust from his thumb and adjusted his hard hat, squinting down through the morning glare.
Spread across the rocky approach, the five hundred armored battle-miners of the Iron Pavilion stood frozen. Each man was encased in riveted boiler-plate armor, gauntlets clutching pneumatic drill pikes that hissed with rhythmic puffs of spirit-steam. Their boots were planted firm in the crushed scree, yet the pike heads trembled in their grasp. They had marched across three provinces, leveling rival clans, splintering fortress gates, and chewing through ancestral hills without meeting resistance that lasted longer than a quarter stick of incense.
Yet today, no immortal sword-legion barred their path. No ancient boundary arrays blazed along the ridge. Just a solitary young man leaning against a split-rail cedar fence, chewing thoughtfully on a toothpick.
On the elevated observation bridge of the three-hundred-ton Colossus, Supreme Grand Elder Tie Kuang stared up at Austin, iron knuckles digging into the brass railing until the metal groaned. His crimson beard bristled with raw Asura qi, whipping in the drafts like fresh blood.
To ordinary eyes, Austin looked like an oddball framing apprentice who’d wandered onto the wrong job site. He wore denim overalls patched at the knees, scuffed work boots, and a leather belt heavy with tape measures, chalk boxes, and forged spanners.
To Tie Kuang’s Peak Golden Core divine sense, the five-foot blue tool resting across the boy’s shoulder was an impossibility.
Pure, unadulterated **Cosmic Star-Steel** ran end to end, throwing off gravitational micro-distortions that bent the morning sunlight around Austin’s collarbone. Dust motes drifting within six inches snapped inward, trapped in an invisible well before scattering into the wind.
*How in the nine hells is he holding that?!* Tie Kuang’s mind screamed in silent, incredulous horror. *A solid bar of Star-Steel that size must mass over ten thousand jin! It has the density of a collapsed star! Even a Body Integration titan would need an earth-anchoring formation just to lift it from the dirt! Yet he props it across his shoulder like a bamboo pole!*
Two centuries of unchecked arrogance in the mining provinces had rotted Tie Kuang’s survival instincts. Greed—hot, suffocating, and blinding—surged through his sea of consciousness, drowning out the gut-deep warning bells.
*He has no visible Golden Core!* Tie Kuang reasoned furiously, jaw clenching beneath his beard. *His dantian appears completely empty—a spiritual void, devoid of even the faintest circulating Qi! He’s an outer disciple sent out to stall for time! That weapon is held aloft by an anti-gravity array stitched into his smock or hidden in his boot heels! Yes, that must be it! A carny trick to bluff the uninitiated!*
Convinced of his deduction, Tie Kuang grabbed the heavy bronze speaking horn, his voice thundering through the gorge:
"Brat! You dare babble about permits and property lines to the Iron Pavilion?! You stand before Supreme Grand Elder Tie Kuang, Bearer of the Imperial Mining Charter and Marshall of the Deep Earth! Hand over that Star-Steel artifact, reveal the subterranean hiding place of your renegade master, and crawl down this mountain on your knees! Otherwise, this Colossus will bore Sunset Peak into gravel, grind your bones to powder, and bury your corpse beneath a million tons of crushed stone!"
The roar crashed through the granite amphitheater of the valley, rattling the timber shingles on the workshop roof and dislodging loose shale from the cliffs.
Austin blinked.
He tilted his head slightly, listening to the rant as if he were an apartment superintendent enduring an unreasonable tenant complaint on a Sunday afternoon. He tapped his boot heel against the decking, checking the acoustic vibration, then leaned over the railing to examine the iron monster idling at the foot of the ridge.
His developer HUD flickered with diagnostic green wireframes over the Colossus.
Austin sighed, pulled the yellow pencil from behind his ear, and made a small, precise checkmark on his clipboard margin.
"Look, pal," Austin called down, his deadpan voice cutting clean through the wind. "First off, whoever machined your main rotary cutter assembly needs their micrometer confiscated. You have an off-balance wobble of at least fourteen point two millimeters on that main spindle. It’s wobbling like an unbalanced washing machine loaded with wet bowling balls. Second, your main drive gearbox is weeping seal grease all over the undercarriage. What did you use for gasket material? Boiled cabbage leaves? Your lube reservoir is down to twenty percent, and that tallow is already scorching black."
Austin pointed his pencil straight at the machine's shuddering belly.
"If you engage that drill head at full torque against unweathered granite, you're going to get severe friction binding, and then you're going to shear your primary drive pinion clean off the output shaft. You're running an unlicensed, mechanically compromised hazard in an active drainage basin. Shut down the boilers, drop your pressure valves, and back that heap out before you kill your crew."
Dead silence dropped over the valley floor.
The five hundred battle-miners traded bewildered glances beneath their visors.
*Off-balance wobble?* whispered a veteran drill sergeant, gauntlets loosening on his pneumatic pike. *Weeping seal grease? Drive pinion? What bizarre First Epoch blood curse is this demon chanting?! Is fourteen-point-two millimeters an ancient hex from the northern wastes?!*
Inside the lower engine compartment, Senior Master Forge-Hand Zhao froze, his palm trembling on a brass steam wheel. He glanced down at the shuddering transmission casing. A thick bead of scorched tallow was indeed sizzling against a hot steam pipe below, spitting greasy white fumes. *How in the ancestral heavens did he spot the seal leak from three hundred paces away?! And the spindle wobble... the chief machinist had complained about lateral vibration during the mountain crossing!*
Up on the observation deck, Tie Kuang’s face flushed a violent, mottled purple. The veins on his neck stood out like thick cords.
To the Supreme Grand Elder of the imperial mining cartel, whose engineering lineage spanned eight generations of imperial foundry masters, being publicly lectured on rotary drilling tolerances by a kid in overalls was the ultimate insult!
"INSOLENT VERMIN!" Tie Kuang bellowed, his Asura qi erupting in a crimson shockwave! "You dare question the sacred craftsmanship of the Imperial Foundry?! You dare mock the Nine-Heavens Colossus with your peasant babble?!"
He brought his iron gauntlet down on the command gong:
*GONGGGGGGG!*
"ENGINEERS! PRIME THE FURNACES! OVERCLOCK THE SPIRIT CORES! BYPASS THE SAFETY SEALS! ENGAGE THE VOID-BREAKING DRILL! BORE INTO SUNSET PEAK, GRIND THEM INTO GRAVEL, AND CRUSH THEM ALL!"
"COMMENCING BORE!" the thirty technicians shouted from within the armored engine cabin, terror of their master drowning out their good sense.
Twelve high-pressure spirit-steam boilers screamed like dying dragons as spirit-coal was shoveled by the ton into the roaring fireboxes. Black smoke and crimson furnace sparks belched from six towering exhaust stacks. The six two-headed mountain oxen bellowed in panic as the heavy iron treads ground forward into the hillside!
*SKRRRRRRRRR-CLANG-CLANG-CLANG!*
The six-story conical drill head, studded with thousands of rotating diamond teeth, began to turn.
Faster and faster it spun, until the air around the cutter cone whistled like a gale, whipping gravel and pine branches into a localized storm. With a cataclysmic shriek that shook the surrounding ridges, the 312-ton Colossus drove its spinning adamantine drill directly into the eastern granite flank of Sunset Peak!
*KRRRRRRRRRRRRRR-BOOOOOOOOOM!*
Granite ledges were pulverized into fine gray dust. A dense shockwave rippled through the mountain's roots, driving straight toward the subterranean void of Floor 1!
Up on the terrace, Austin watched the machine chew into the rock, showering the trees in friction sparks, flying shale, and choking silica clouds. The floorboards beneath his boots rattled violently.
Austin's brow furrowed in deep, professional disgust.
"Did he miss every single word about the bearing seals?" Austin muttered, shaking his head. "Look at that dust plume. No water mist suppression nozzles. No particulate ventilation. And now he’s cutting into my eastern retaining wall without an engineered shoring trench. If he compromises the bedrock beneath my root cellar, I’m going to be furious."
He snapped his clipboard shut and tucked the grease pencil behind his ear.
"Li Xiaoyao! Put your hard hat on," Austin shouted back toward the workshop, jogging smoothly toward the cellar hatch. "Grab the grease gun and the spare wedges. Some cowboy contractor just rammed an unlicensed drilling rig into our wall. We're going down to shut it down."
From inside the workshop, Li Xiaoyao tumbled out, frantically cinching the chin strap of a yellow hard hat while clutching a brass grease gun and an iron bucket of forged steel wedges.
"Boss! Are they attacking with an imperial siege formation?!" Xiaoyao shouted, eyes wide as the workshop rafters creaked under the underground shockwaves. "Should I ready the flying swords?!"
"Swords won't fix an unpermitted rotary boring head chewing through load-bearing granite," Austin said dryly, settling the Cosmic Star-Steel bar against his shoulder. "Bring the wedges. And watch your step on the landing—the vibration probably shook some mortar loose."
At Austin’s heels, Pug barked—a sharp, triple-throated yip that echoed down the stone passage. All three tails wagged as the hound bounded down the spiral stone steps into the deep earth, ready to help enforce a physical stop-work order.