Fifty meters beneath the roots of Sunset Peak, the reinforced eastern basalt wall of Floor 1 began to shudder with deep, rhythmic tectonic groans.
Austin jogged briskly down the final stone risers of the spiral staircase, stepping out onto the smooth, polished obsidian floor tiles of the central workshop. The subterranean air, normally filtered clean through charcoal baffles and cool moisture condensators, was already growing thick with the dry, chalky taste of pulverized rock.
Near the primary conveyor line, Li Xiaoyao stood frozen. The boy clutched a brass pneumatic grease gun in one shaking hand and a five-gallon bucket of dry quenching sand in the other. His eyes were wide with white-rimmed terror, his yellow hard hat vibrating against his brow.
Over by the dormant blast furnace, the three draft pangolins—Digger One, Digger Two, and Chonker—had crammed their heavy bulk under the cast-iron workbenches. Chonker, the biggest of the trio, had balled himself up into a tight, armored sphere of overlapping scales, snout tucked under his belly, whimpering like an oversized pug every time a shower of stone dust drifted down from the ceiling joints.
"Senior Austin! Senior Austin!" Xiaoyao yelled over the rising mechanical shriek vibrating through the stone. "The eastern bedrock is rupturing! The mountain's subterranean dragon meridian is being severed! The spiritual leylines of the peak are collapsing into the abyss!"
Austin ignored the dragon meridian talk. He ignored the hairline fractures spiderwebbing across the unreinforced upper stone arch, too.
His eyes locked straight on the floor.
Specifically, he looked at the central assembly table. A thin, pale gray dusting of powdered shale and crushed granite had drifted through the air vents, settling in an unsightly, abrasive film over the freshly waxed surface of his automated conveyor belt.
Austin stopped dead in his tracks.
His mouth set into a hard, deeply offended line. The yellow grease pencil behind his ear gave an involuntary twitch.
"I swept that belt thirty minutes ago," Austin said, his voice dangerously level and flat enough to true a warped timber. "I used the microfiber mop. I wiped the vulcanized canvas down with lint-free citrus solvent. I balanced the tensioners to within half a millimeter."
He glared at the shuddering wall.
"And now some illiterate clown with an oversized auger is dumping unclassified particulate aggregate directly onto my clean assembly line."
*KRRRRRR-CRACK-BOOOOOOM!*
The eastern basalt wall gave way with a deafening, concussive roar. Boulders weighing several tons were hurled outward across the workshop floor in a hail of jagged shrapnel, gouging deep scars into the perimeter drainage gutters and chipping the obsidian tile borders!
Through the gaping twelve-foot breach, coughing sulfurous steam and churning heavy iron tracks, the monstrous conical snout of the **Nine-Heavens Earth-Drill Colossus** burst into the hall!
The six-story-tall spiral cone was an abomination of brute-force imperial engineering. Banded with cold-iron rings and armored in black meteoric plates, its outer face was studded with thousands of rotating diamond teeth made of sacred Void-Breaking Adamantine. It screamed at three hundred revolutions per minute, spinning with the fury of a trapped typhoon. Blinding, white-hot orange friction sparks showered thirty feet into the cavern air!
From inside the Colossus's armored forward control cabin, visible through the reinforced quartz observation slits, the triumphant, blood-maddened roar of Supreme Grand Elder Tie Kuang tore through the breach:
*"BREACH ACHIEVED! THE SUBTERRANEAN STRONGHOLD IS PIERCED! ENGINEERS, CRANK THE BOILERS TO MAXIMUM OVERPRESSURE! OVERHEAT THE SPIRIT FIREBOXES! ADVANCE THE TREADS! GRIND THE ENTIRE CAVERN INTO GRAVEL AND SMASH THEIR CORPSES INTO PASTE!"*
Inside the belly of the machine, twelve spirit-steam boilers shrieked at 800 PSI, their bronze safety relief valves violently shuddering against their seats. The giant transmission gears groaned under fifty thousand foot-pounds of hydraulic torque, driving the spinning adamantine cone deeper into the subterranean hall.
It was chewing directly toward Austin's newly commissioned Pelton waterwheel turbine—the heart of his automated workshop's electrical grid.
Austin didn't draw a sword. He didn't slap down a defensive talisman. He simply walked briskly toward the screaming, rotating wall of death, his boots clicking firmly against the stone tiles.
"Hey!" Austin shouted over the deafening mechanical screech, cupping both hands around his mouth. "Shut that thing down! Kill the ignition! You're throwing high-silica rock dust directly into my conveyor roller bearings! Do you have any earthly idea how difficult it is to flush powdered shale out of precision needle bearings without a full ultrasonic degreasing bath?!"
Naturally, inside the thundering, steam-filled metal tomb of the Colossus, nobody heard a word.
The technicians were completely deafened by the roar of the boilers, and Tie Kuang was laughing with maniacal ecstasy as the drill cone advanced, its adamantine teeth mere yards from chewing through the intake penstock of the waterwheel.
Austin sighed. He shook his head with the weary, bone-deep exhaustion of a factory maintenance manager dealing with reckless, subcontracted day-laborers who had driven an excavator into an operating hospital ward.
"Unbelievable," Austin muttered, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Zero situational awareness. Zero dust abatement curtains. And absolute, flagrant disregard for Lockout/Tagout protocol. You can't just leave heavy machinery running during an unauthorized structural breach."
Austin glanced down at his heavy steel utility cart parked beside the secondary anvil. Resting on the thick iron bed was an unrefined, eighty-pound rectangular ingot of Tier 4 **Stellar-Steel**—still warm from the induction blast furnace, glowing with a soft, hypnotic sapphire phosphorescence.
Austin reached down with his right hand.
Without breaking stride, without grunting or bracing his legs, he scooped up the eighty-pound cosmic metal bar as casually as if it were a six-pack of canned soda.
He walked straight up to the screaming, spinning face of the six-story adamantine drill cone. The intense air currents generated by the rotating cone whipped his denim overalls against his shins, and hot friction sparks bounced harmlessly off the brim of his yellow plastic hard hat.
Austin eyed the rotating assembly with the clinical, detached eye of an experienced millwright.
He tracked the rotation of the spiral cutter head. He located the primary flute—the deep intake channel between the rotating cutter face and the heavy, stationary cast-iron shroud designed to eject crushed spoil.
Then, with a smooth, effortless flick of his wrist, Austin shoved the eighty-pound block of Stellar-Steel directly between the rotating diamond teeth and the fixed iron housing.
It was the industrial equivalent of jamming an iron crowbar into the spinning blades of an electric lawnmower.
Except this crowbar possessed the degenerate molecular density of a collapsed star core.
*TING.*
The initial contact between the two metals produced a tiny, almost delicate chime—a high-pitched metallic note that hung suspended in the cavern air for a fraction of a heartbeat.
Then, physics arrived with the subtlety of a collapsing mountain range.
The thousands of diamond teeth made of sacred Void-Breaking Adamantine—revered by the Great Yan Empire's greatest forge-masters as the hardest, most unbreakable substance in the mortal realm—slammed into the immovable molecular lattice of Tier 4 Stellar-Steel.
Zero bite. Zero scratches. The glowing blue billet didn't even pick up a scuff mark.
The sacred adamantine teeth **disintegrated**.
*CRACK-CRACK-SHATTER-BOOOOOOM!*
In less than one-hundredth of a second, every single diamond tooth on the forward face of the drill cone was pulverized into clouds of microscopic, glittering diamond dust!
The sudden, dead stop of the rotating drill head shattered the entire drive system.
The three-hundred-ton Colossus was currently operating under fifty thousand foot-pounds of rotational kinetic energy, backed by twelve over-pressurized steam boilers running at triple their rated atmospheric capacity. Rotational kinetic energy cannot simply evaporate into the void. It must obey the immutable laws of thermodynamics and mechanics. It must go somewhere.
And it went straight backward, tearing through the machine's drivetrain with apocalyptic fury.
Inside the Colossus engine room:
*KAPOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW!*
The main five-foot cast-iron drive pinion—the exact component Austin had explicitly warned Tie Kuang about fifteen minutes prior on the sunlit surface—sheared violently in half with a deafening metallic report!
The six-inch hardened steel drive shafts twisted like wet licorice ropes and snapped into jagged shards. Massive bronze bevel gears exploded into lethal shrapnel, ricocheting through the interior bulkheads like grapeshot. Simultaneously, all twelve high-pressure steam pipes ruptured at their flanged joints, flooding the armored compartments with blinding clouds of scalding white vapor, boiling tallow, and shrieking whistles:
*HISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!*
On the elevated observation bridge, Supreme Grand Elder Tie Kuang, Chief Engineer Mo, and twenty-eight armored technicians were instantly converted into human projectiles, catapulted through the air like dice shaken inside a pewter cup!
*THUD! SMACK! CRUNCH!*
Miners and forge-hands bounced violently off the reinforced iron ceiling, crashed through shattered brass instrument consoles, and slammed into a tangled heap of smoking gears and ruptured boiler plating, groaning in dazed, concussed agony.
Down in the subterranean workshop, the silence returned with stunning suddenness.
The colossal six-story drill cone sat completely motionless, cold, dead, and utterly paralyzed. The eighty-pound rectangular bar of sapphire Stellar-Steel was wedged firmly between two sheared iron splines, looking completely untouched, as if it had simply been placed there on a display pedestal.
Austin dusted off his denim sleeves.
He reached up, plucked the yellow grease pencil from behind his ear, and tapped the wedged metal bar twice with an approving nod.
"Told you the pinion would shear," Austin muttered, turning toward Li Xiaoyao.
Li Xiaoyao was pressed flat against the far wall of the workshop, his jaw hanging so low that his chin nearly touched his collarbone. The grease gun in his hands was shaking with such violent tremors that drops of amber grease were spattering across the floor.
"Fourteen point two millimeters of off-balance wobble," Austin explained patiently, gesturing with his pencil at the smoking breach. "Bone-dry seal grease. If you introduce an unexpected shock load to an unlubricated drivetrain operating with that much play, the shear pin snaps every single time. It's not magic. It's not a Dao curse. It’s basic high school mechanics."
"S-Senior..." Li Xiaoyao stammered, his eyes bulging as he stared at the eighty-pound block of cosmic metal wedged into the imperial war engine. "You... you jammed an imperial siege machine with an ingot?!"
"It was the closest scrap piece on the table," Austin said mildly. "Though I'll probably have to re-square the corners on the milling machine. That was supposed to be a guide rail."
Suddenly, from the top of the jammed Colossus, a heavy armored hatch was kicked violently outward!
*CLANG!*
The iron hatch tore off its hinges, whistling through the cavern air and embedding itself deep into the stone ceiling. An instant later, a towering, enraged figure leaped down from the top of the machine, landing heavily upon the obsidian floor tiles with a bone-jarring impact!
*BOOM!*
The floor tiles cracked beneath his boots.
It was Supreme Grand Elder Tie Kuang.
His spiked Earth-Dragon armor was charred black and dented in a dozen places, scalding steam whistled from his cracked shoulder pauldrons, and his crimson beard was caked with soot and scorched gear grease. In his right hand, he clutched his dented Mountain-Crushing Warhammer, its spirit-steel head glowing with an unstable, sputtering light.
Crimson, blood-red Asura qi flared from every pore of his body, saturating the subterranean hall with the suffocating, murderous killing intent of a Peak Golden Core sovereign pushed to absolute, unhinged madness!
"WHO DID THIS?!" Tie Kuang roared, his bloodshot eyes sweeping wildly across the workshop before locking onto Austin. "WHO DARED DESTROY THE EMPIRE’S SACRED COLOSSUS?!"