The Great Northern Imperial Highway cut through the red sandstone gorges of the Canglan Borderlands like a slab of neglected concrete.
Red grit coated everything. It worked between teeth, settled behind boot tongues, and turned mule sweat into yellow paste. High on the rimrock, scrub pines clung to dry stone.
Austin kept an even pace along the centerline.
*Clomp, clomp, clomp.*
Heavy steel-toed boots struck the split-face granite pavers with the dull thud of a pneumatic tamper. Around his ankles, twelve gray pebbles and thirty dried pine needles traced silent orbits. Three revolutions per minute. Flat plane. A faint sixty-hertz hum vibrated through his boot soles, keeping the road debris locked in a six-inch gravitational ring.
Austin pushed his wire-rimmed safety glasses up his nose. His dented midnight-blue hard hat took the brunt of the sun, but heat off the pavers felt like standing over an open asphalt kettle.
A few paces back, Li Xiaoyao led two mountain mules. Lashings creaked against cedar crates. Four boxes sat strapped across pack saddles, each packed with mirror-polished bars of Tier 4 Stellar-Steel. Fifty pounds per crate, counterbalanced so cleanly the packs never tilted.
Bringing up the rear was the dog.
All eight hundred pounds of him.
Cerberus Pug ambled with the bowlegged waddle of an oversized bulldog, his obsidian hide shimmering with heat. Custom harness leather creaked across his chest, carrying tent, water jugs, and a tin pail of four dozen hard-boiled solar eggs. The dog’s left head sniffed a dead lizard on the curb. His right head watched a buzzard with lazy contempt. The middle head held an old Neoprene packing grommet, happily gnawing the rubber into black gum.
*Snort. Snerk. Chomp.*
Every twenty yards, his middle head let out a heavy sigh of scorched ozone.
Austin stopped dead.
He knelt on the sun-baked pavers, pulling a brass vernier caliper from his tool belt. He jammed the probe into a seam between two stones, laying the flat edge across the crown.
"Cheap municipal bid," Austin muttered. "Sub-base compaction ain't terrible. Crushed granite over river sand, maybe ninety percent Proctor density. But look at this crown slope. Xiaoyao, check this."
The disciple hurried forward, pulling out a pocket ledger. "Does the road conceal an ancient array, Patriarch?"
"Worse. Rotten drainage geometry," Austin grunted. "Cross-fall is barely one point two percent. On an uncurbed arterial route with heavy wagon tonnage, you need a minimum two-percent slope to the ditch. Otherwise, runoff won't shed. It pools in the wheel ruts. Standing water creates hydroplaning hazards, seeps into joint sand, and builds subgrade pore pressure. First hard freeze, the top course buckles like cheap linoleum."
Xiaoyao scribbled furiously. "Incredible! For centuries, caravan masters claimed these gorges were haunted by an Earth-Devouring Fiend that snaps wagon axles! To think the fiend was merely... inadequate municipal slope!"
"Ain't no fiend," Austin said, pocketing the caliper. "Just lazy civil engineering. Lowest bidder pocketed the grading budget, dumped unwashed gravel, and pencil-whipped the inspection sheet."
He took a swallow of lukewarm jasmine tea from his dented thermos, tasting old copper pipe, and screwed the cap tight.
Before he took another stride, a sharp whistle split the heat.
*THWACK!*
A five-foot iron-tipped ballista bolt drilled into the pavers three feet ahead of Austin’s boots. Stone shattered. White dust and flint chips sprayed across the road. Orbiting pebbles around his ankles flicked the shrapnel aside, grinding the chips into gray powder.
Austin didn't flinch. He stared at the chipped stone with the deep weariness of a foreman watching a backhoe snag a gas main.
"Structural vandalism of public transit infrastructure," Austin sighed, taking his yellow grease pencil from behind his ear. "Class-three misdemeanor."
Horns blew from the rim above.
Down from the boulders scrambled thirty leather-clad brigands, sliding down the scree with jagged sabers drawn. Eight of them dragged a barricade across the lane: three sharpened oak logs lashed with rusty wire, braced with bent wagon rims.
They wore patchy wolf pelts and greasy bandanas. The reek of unwashed armpits, sour liquor, and stale tallow drifted down the road.
Bandit Chief Scar-Face Zhang stepped forward, planting a six-foot chopper onto the barricade. He had a scarred chin, yellow teeth, and the cocky swagger of an Early Foundation thug.
"Well, well, look what crawled out of the dust," Zhang sneered. "A carpenter in blue dungarees wearing an upside-down pot, an apprentice boy, two mules... and some kinda bloated pig-dog with three ugly mugs."
Pug paused his chewing.
His left head tilted, floppy black ear twitching. His middle head spit the rubber grommet onto the dirt, snorted gray smoke, and sniffed the bandit chief's wolf pelt.
Zhang pointed his rusted blade at the crates.
"Listen up, dung-beetle!" Zhang barked. "This pass belongs to the Scarlet-Bone Syndicate! You wanna walk through to the capital, toll is fifty high-grade gold coins! Pay cash right now, or we strip your hides, boil your mules, and feed your toad to the vultures!"
Fifty gold coins.
Austin stood in the center of the lane. He didn't drop into a martial stance or draw qi. He didn't reach for the five-foot blue pipe wrench in his thigh holster.
Instead, his gaze unfocused as his retina HUD flared into life.
Austin’s left eyebrow twitched.
His posture went rigid with the icy fury of a freight driver flagged down by teenagers demanding diesel money.
"Fifty gold coins?" Austin's voice was flat, dry, and cold. "For an uncurbed gravel pass with zero guardrails and no emergency pullouts?"
Zhang blinked, thrown off. "What?"
Austin unclipped a birchwood clipboard from his belt, clicked his yellow grease pencil, and pointed the blunt wax tip straight at Zhang's chest.
"Where is your posted tariff schedule?" Austin demanded, stepping forward two paces. His heavy boots thumped like iron weights. "Under imperial highway codes, any party operating a toll gate on an arterial right-of-way must display an all-weather bronze or enameled signboard. It needs your commercial registration number, clear axle-weight classifications, and hazardous cargo exemptions. Where's your charter?"
Silence rolled through the pass. Thirty bandits looked between Austin and their chief, wicked smirks fading into blank confusion.
"On top of that," Austin pressed on, voice ringing off the canyon walls, "your barricade violates every safety ordinance in the book. Unpainted timber stakes without orange reflective flagging. Scrap wagon iron with exposed sharp edges presenting severe puncture risk to draft hooves. And twenty yards back, I saw an eight-inch pothole that nearly broke my lead mule's fetlock. Where's your maintenance escrow account? Are toll receipts reinvested into slurry seals and shoulder weed abatement, or are you running an unauthorized pirate cash-grab?"
Zhang’s face turned the color of a ripe beet. Veins bulged along his neck.
*Tariff schedule? Reflective flagging? Maintenance escrow?! What kind of lunatic dialect is this bastard spewing?!*
"Are you out of your mind, boy?!" Zhang roared, swinging the chopper over his shoulder. "I am Scar-Face Zhang! I butcher Foundation masters for pocket change! I don't need parchment—I HAVE A CHOPPER! BROTHERS, CHOP THEM DOWN! GUT THE MULES!"
Thirty bandits screamed, raising spears and sabers as they surged forward!
In the rear, Pug’s patience ran out.
The shouting was bad enough. The rattling scrap iron was annoying. But when Zhang took a heavy step toward the mules, the vibrations threatened to jostle the cedar crates and crack the fragile shells of Austin’s hard-boiled solar eggs.
That crossed the line.
The dog's middle head sat up. All six ruby eyes narrowed into slits.
Pug opened his massive jowls and let out a long, bone-tired, thoroughly bored yawn.
*HAAAAAAAH.*
Deep within the beast’s chest, the Nether-Solar furnace shifted gears. Not an attack. Not even a defensive bite. Just a tired burp of thermal waste heat—a microscopic zero point zero one percent exhaust cycle venting through the throat.
A wave of sapphire-white thermal radiance pulsed through the canyon like a camera flash.
*WHOOOOOOOSH.*
The air snapped from dry desert heat straight to twelve hundred degrees Celsius in three microseconds.
The iron spearheads held by the charging bandits liquefied.
Metal turned instantly into runny, glowing orange syrup, dribbling off charred ash-wood shafts and splashing across leather sandals like spilled porridge.
*Sssssssss!*
Wolf pelts vanished into greasy puffs of soot. Hair, eyebrows, mustaches, and beards vaporized in a single pop, leaving thirty bald, singed heads gleaming pink in the desert light.
Zhang’s sixty-pound chopper turned white-hot. He shrieked, dropping the handle as molten iron hit the granite pavers. The blade melted straight down through the four-inch stone blocks and sank into bedrock like a hot nickel through cold lard, spitting white sparks.
The charge stopped dead.
Thirty bandits stood frozen, hairless, soot-streaked, clutching smoking sticks with glowing iron droplets sizzling on the dirt.
Nobody moved. Nobody breathed.
Slowly, thirty pairs of eyes darted past Austin's denim overalls to look at the "bloated dog."
Pug was sitting up now. Rings of violet tribulation lightning crackled quietly around his three necks, throwing sharp shadows against the canyon walls. His middle head casually lifted a massive black paw, gave the dewclaw a wet lick, and let out a soft canine grunt before lying back down in the dust.
*Thump, thump.* His heavy spiked tail patted the dirt twice.
Zhang’s legs gave out completely. He hit the scorching granite face-first, nose pressing into soot, weeping with such terror that tears boiled into steam on the superheated pavers.
"S-S-Sovereign..." Zhang blubbered, clawing frantically at the stone. "Ancient Nine Nether Hellhound... Calamity Beast of the Void... carrying camp gear..."
Austin walked past the weeping bandit chief, boots crunching across molten slag. He tapped his grease pencil against his clipboard, pointing at the scorched barricade.
"You have sixty seconds to clear this scrap from the public lane," Austin said. "Impeding arterial traffic without a permit is a class-two infraction. If these timbers ain't stacked neat against the rock wall by the time my mules take ten paces, I’m impounding your scrap metal and billing you for cleanup."
"YES SIR! CLEARING THE ROAD! AT ONCE!"
Thirty bald, blistered bandits threw themselves at the barricade.
They tore the logs apart with bare, smoking fingers, wrestled the glowing wagon rims into the ditch, and frantically buffed the scorched granite with the hems of their tunics in under nine seconds flat.
When Austin walked past, the entire gang knelt along the rock wall, foreheads pressed to the gravel, trembling in unison.
Austin glanced back, giving the clear lane a nod.
"See, Xiaoyao?" Austin said, tucking the grease pencil behind his ear. "Clear communication, firm regulatory boundaries. You don't need flashy sword light when you enforce the standard building code."
"The Patriarch’s administrative Dao encompasses all heavens!" Xiaoyao declared, leading the mules forward.
Pug trotted after them, scooping up his rubber grommet on the fly, tails wagging in lazy circles.
*Clomp, clomp, clomp.*
The little pebbles spun steadily around Austin’s boots as the convoy pressed on toward the Grand Citadel of Canglan.