Five hundred and thirty-two former imperial battle miners and twelve retrofitted basalt siege golems can move an obscene amount of rock when nobody is wasting time carving blood-altars or chanting over bone flutes. Backed by strict industrial safety protocols, excavation under Sunset Peak ran with the greased rhythm of a shipyard drydock.
Supreme Grand Elder Tie Kuang had thrown himself into his post as Floor 1 Safety & Logistics Supervisor with the zeal of a converted fanatic.
Every morning at 06:00 sharp, the damp underground cavern woke not to sectarian war drums, but to the shriek of Tie Kuang’s brass whistle.
Five hundred and thirty-two men snapped into six company columns across the leveled obsidian staging floor. Every head wore a yellow hard hat Austin had stamped out of cured spirit-resin. Every shoulder carried a neon-orange vest with silver retroreflective tape crisscrossed over the back.
Before a pick swung or an air hose hissed, Tie Kuang put the battalion through mandatory calisthenics: five minutes of deliberate posture correction—hamstring extensions, rotator cuff rotations, and pelvic tilts to prevent repetitive strain injuries. The former tyrant paced the front line, his massive jaw set like an anvil, glaring down rows of calloused men until every knee bent true.
Then came the morning devotion. In this hole, scripture came off Austin’s greaseboard.
"Recite the Fourth Golden Rule of the Sacred Workshop!" Tie Kuang bellowed, his baritone bouncing off the vaulted basalt ribs.
"THREE POINTS OF CONTACT ON ALL VERTICAL LADDERS!" five hundred and thirty-two throats roared back in devout dread. "TWO HANDS AND ONE FOOT, OR TWO FEET AND ONE HAND! HE WHO JUMPS OFF A SCAFFOLD STAGING SHALL HAVE HIS TEA PRIVILEGES SUSPENDED FOR THREE SHIFTS!"
"Recite the Seventh Decree!" Tie Kuang’s amber eyes flicked down rank four.
"NO LOOSE SLEEVES OR FLOWING LINEN NEAR ROTATING SHAFTS!" the miners barked in locked cadence. "HAIRNETS SHALL CONFINE ALL BEARDS EXCEEDING THREE INCHES! FOR THE SPIRIT CORE KNOWS NEITHER KIN NOR CLAN, AND THE SPUR GEAR HAS NO MERCY TO GIVE!"
"Amen!" Tie Kuang pounded his iron gauntlet against his breastplate with a metallic boom. "Fasten those chin buckles! Clip your tool lanyards to your D-rings! Pick up your trowels and bring glory to the Master Builder! Dismissed!"
Beside him, young Li Xiaoyao bustled along with an oversized plastic clipboard and clear safety goggles pinched over his nose. The boy took his post as Junior Compliance Inspector dead seriously. He scurried between workstations, checking tags on the dry-chemical extinguishers and restocking eyewash stations with fresh saline and clean gauze.
Whenever a senior quarryman slacked on his footing, Xiaoyao didn't shout. He marched up, tapped his pencil against the clipboard, and pointed at the laminated sign Austin had tacked to the primary granite pillar:
*SAFETY IS NO ACCIDENT. REPORT ALL NEAR-MISSES TO MANAGEMENT.*
The old-timers shrank back from the boy's pencil like it was a drawn broadsword. Nobody wanted Tie Kuang lumbering over to investigate an infraction.
The eight-foot-tall grandmaster spent his shifts stalking the drifts with a milled six-foot bronze spirit-level clutched in his thick fists. He hunted for sins against geometry. If a stonecutter laid a basalt block half a millimeter off true, Tie Kuang’s horned shadow fell across the mortar box like an approaching storm.
"Plumb lines, you scabby ground-moles!" Tie Kuang would growl, bringing the bronze level right to the apprentice’s nose. "The Patriarch specified zero point one millimeter planar tolerance across all primary structural masonry! If I lay this true-edge against your vertical seam and catch a single needle of lantern light bleeding through, you will scrape that joint out with your thumbnails and chew the wet lime for lunch!"
"Understood, Grand Supervisor!" the workers yelled back, sweating as they tapped furiously with rubber dead-blow mallets to seat the blocks flush.
Down the main drift, the heavy lifting belonged to the iron.
Austin had spent seventy-two hours gutting the twelve Subterranean Siege Golems captured from the imperial raid. He hauled out their cracked, blood-stained formation matrices—crude, soul-burning junk that guzzled mortal lifeforce—and dumped them into the scrap hopper.
In their hollowed chest cavities, Austin built real machine rooms: laminated copper busbars, step-down isolation transformers, overload relays, and heavy braided grounding straps. He junked the unstable spirit-valves, re-plumbing the four-inch hydraulic actuators with braided steel lines rated for five thousand PSI. The twelve-unit squad now drew clean, regulated three-phase alternating current tapped straight off the Pelton wheel dynamo.
Stripped of war spikes and painted safety-yellow with black chevron hazard stripes, the twelve-foot basalt hulls operated as high-torque hydraulic excavators. Diamond-core pneumatic breakers mounted to their forearms bit into the granite roots with a deafening chitter, shattering rock into uniform aggregate. Articulated scoops shoveled broken spoil into waiting steel side-dump mine cars without spilling a shovelful.
Hauling those trains fell to the draft pangolins.
Digger One, Digger Two, and Chonker each wore custom-formed hard hats shaped around their armored browplates, held fast with neoprene straps. Chonker, an eight-hundred-pound slab of armored scutes with a single-minded devotion to roasted sweet potatoes, took pride in his work. He leaned into his padded harness, heavy clawed feet digging into the ballast, and hauled strings of ten-ton ore cars down the twenty-four-inch narrow-gauge rail. His thick tail swished rhythmically behind him, keeping time with the click-clack of the steel wheels.
Under this relentless cadence, Sunset Peak gave up its stone.
In fourteen days of round-the-clock three-shift excavation, Austin pushed the project through two complete underground levels, sinking the complex deeper into living bedrock.
At negative one hundred meters lay Subterranean Floor 2: the Heavy Smelting & Metallurgy Foundry.
Austin had turned two thousand square meters of hollowed mountain into an industrial hall of vitrified white tile. He glazed the masonry walls using plasma runoff siphoned from his stellar core, sealing the porous rock against moisture, radon gas, and soot. Down the center aisle, anchored to six-foot-deep reinforced footings, stood four twin-crucible Stellar-Induction Blast Furnaces.
Austin rigged overhead pneumatic charging bins on an automated monorail. Scrapped armor plates and sheared structural beams from the dismantled three-hundred-ton Colossus dropped straight into the levitation coils on a programmed cycle.
Inside the crucibles, magnetic fields crushed the metal, superheating it to three thousand degrees Celsius. Induction currents spun the molten soup, while automated ceramic skimmers dragged mortal slag off the crown. Pneumatic feed tubes metered out pulverized Azure-Dragon ore and refined star-dust into the liquid pool, alloying the charge with molecular consistency. Every eight hours, tapping spouts tilted forward, pouring gleaming streams of liquid metal into chill molds that spat out stacks of Tier 4 Stellar-Steel ingots.
Another fifty meters straight down through the freezing granite roots, at negative one hundred and fifty meters, Austin established Subterranean Floor 3: the Cryogenic Heat Sink & Cooling Chamber.
Here, the mountain aquifer Austin had dammed and diverted weeks earlier roared through deep bedrock raceways lined with flanged copper heat exchangers. The glacial water—naturally frigid and heavy with mineral salts—swallowed the monstrous thermal exhaust dumping out of Floor 2’s induction coils.
Austin didn't vent that thermal energy into the sky.
Following the strict safety rules of standard boiler codes, Austin treated the underground steam loop as a heavy-duty pressure piping network. Every boiler tank was rolled from thick plate, welded solid, and water-pressure tested to one point five times its maximum working limit.
He didn't rely on magical charms to keep boilers from blowing the mountain apart. He installed calibrated bronze safety relief valves with lifting levers, dual Bourdon-tube pressure gauges, and heavy blowdown valves plumbed straight into granite quench pits.
When return water hit the heat exchangers, it flashed instantly into high-pressure dry steam at two hundred and forty pounds per square inch. Austin routed that superheated steam through double-insulated schedule-80 expansion manifolds, feeding it directly into three twin-cylinder reciprocating steam dynamos. The dynamos hummed at eighteen hundred RPM, generating an additional eighty kilowatts of clean electrical power that fed straight back into the central distribution bus.
Connecting all three subterranean tiers to the surface staging yard was the logistical backbone of the facility: a three-story, fully counterweighted Industrial Freight Elevator.
Austin erected four vertical guide columns of milled Stellar-Steel I-beams, anchored into bedrock pilings with two-inch foundation bolts. The open-cage platform, framed from structural channel and floored with diamond-tread plate, was rated for a continuous working load of twenty metric tons. A balanced twin-drum hoisting winch, turned by an enclosed gear reducer hooked to the Pelton turbine's bull shaft, drove four redundant wire ropes equipped with mechanical wedge safeties.
During the inaugural inspection run, Austin crammed Li Xiaoyao, Tie Kuang, and a petrified Sect Master Gu Qing into the cage. The cultivators seized the brass handrails with white knuckles, bracing for the spine-jarring drops typical of mortal mine skips.
The cage didn't shudder. It slipped down the illuminated vertical shaft with the uncanny, hushed glide of an oil-damped hydraulic piston.
Halfway down, Gu Qing set a porcelain bowl filled to the brim with hot green tea onto the diamond-plate deck. The cage dropped fifty meters, smoothly decelerated, and settled level with Floor 2's threshold without a click.
The surface of the tea sat dead still. Glass-calm. Zero ripples kissing the glazed rim.
The Clear Sky Sect Master knelt beside that teacup for two full minutes, mouth open, staring at the motionless liquid. Down here, a mortal frame of steel and grease held the earth itself completely motionless.
Now, Austin stood on the open observation catwalk of Floor 3, leaning his forearms against the safety railing.
Fluorescent shop lamps, powered by the closed-loop steam dynamos, cast a clean, daylight-white glare across all three tiers. Far down beneath the floor grates, the icy aquifer surged through its copper channels with a steady rush. Above, the four blast furnaces droned at sixty cycles, their low electromagnetic hum vibrating through the rock like the purr of a well-tuned diesel generator.
Austin pulled his pressed-fiber clipboard from his hip, unclipped a stubby yellow grease pencil, and checked off the final line items on the site inspection report.
Austin allowed himself a short, quiet grunt of satisfaction.
Every electrical run was tucked into rigid conduit, strapped down with stainless steel clamps every three feet. Hydraulic hard lines were color-coded with painted bands and flow arrows. The vitreous floor tiles were spotless: zero grease spills, zero slag spatter, and no loose wire trailing across the gangways. Clean runs, solid grounds, and no jury-rigged extensions waiting to arc out.
"There," Austin muttered, thumbing a spot of graphite off his knuckle. "A proper mid-game hub. Symmetrical runs, clean busbars, zero spaghetti routing, and steady automated yield."
He leaned over the railing, looking across to Floor 2’s cooling bay. Stacks of freshly poured Stellar-Steel ingots sat on cedar pallets under the mist nozzles, their cooled skins glowing with a faint sapphire twilight.
"Four hundred and fifty bars of Tier 4 structural alloy rolling off the line every single day," Austin said, tapping the flat of his pencil against his chin. He glanced down at his frayed denim overalls and his worn hemp work sandals. "High time I stopped wandering around this rock in rags. If the server is gearing up to drop a new content patch, I need real PPE before I set foot off this mountain."