Beyond the titanium blast doors of Sector 4 lay the legendary **Sanctum of Ten Thousand Immortal Tablets**.
In the sacred lore of the Western Cultivation Continent, this subterranean vault was revered as the ancient archive of the First Gods—the celestial library where the architects of reality had chiseled the foundational laws of the cosmos.
It was a cavernous hall stretching two hundred meters into the bedrock, washed in the soft amber glow of linear strip fixtures set into acoustic ceiling baffles. Arranged in fifty parallel rows across the polished terrazzo floor stood hundreds of towering, obsidian-black monoliths. Each monolith rose ten feet into the chilled air, encased in brushed aerospace-grade silver alloy and pulsing with rhythmic traces of cyan and amber light. A continuous low hum resonated through the room, carrying the crisp, chemical tang of chilled dielectric fluid and ozone.
According to sect scrolls, each monolith was a Divine Stele containing the supreme mechanics of heaven: the Dao of Heavenly Mechanics, Void Propulsion, and Sovereign Astral Alchemy. Sect patriarchs who had caught even a momentary glimpse through spatial fractures centuries ago had founded entire lineages based on three glowing characters glimpsed on a single pillar. Touching an immortal stele without undergoing seven years of ritual fasting was an imperial crime, said to summon nine generations of tribulation thunder down upon the offender's bloodline.
Austin stepped across the threshold: *Clomp.*
He stopped dead in his steel-toed work boots. He froze in the center aisle, eyes wide behind his wire-rimmed spectacles.
"Holy mother of cable management..." Austin breathed, his voice dropping to a church whisper.
Where the ancient scrolls saw divine steles and ancient cosmic tombs, Austin saw fifty clean rows of **Standard 42U Server Racks**. Cold-rolled titanium uprights. Precision-shimmed leveling feet. Flawless thirty-six-inch cold-aisle clearances, laid out in strict compliance with ANSI/TIA-942 data center standards.
Suspended from the high ceiling on zinc-plated Unistrut trapezes hung miles of perforated yellow fiber-optic cable trays and dual-redundant liquid-cooling loops. Seamless three-inch braided stainless steel and polished titanium pipe ran dead straight, without a fraction of an inch of sag. Every cable run was bundled tight with color-coded hook-and-loop straps. No cheap plastic zip-ties snipped off at forty-five-degree angles to slice a mechanic's forearms to ribbons in the dark. Every bundle took clean, ninety-degree radius bends that almost brought a tear to Austin's eye.
Austin tapped his temple, bringing up his system HUD.
Austin’s fingers twitched with pure contractor greed.
"Look at the finish on this sheet metal," Austin murmured, running a gloved thumb along the matte-black powder coat of the nearest cabinet. "Zero galvanic corrosion. Tool-less quick-release server rails with ball-bearing slides. And look at these manifold fittings—dry-break brass quick-disconnects with Viton O-rings! You couldn't buy this quality off the shelf at any supply house between here and the capital. Enterprise-grade mil-spec hardware, just sitting here collecting cave dust."
Li Xiaoyao rushed through the door behind him, his knees knocking so hard his scabbard rattled against his belt:
"S-Senior! Please, by the ancestors, tread softly!" Xiaoyao begged, clutching his chest with both hands. "These are the Sacred Steles of the Ancient Sages! The imperial records warn that anyone who defiles their holy presence will be struck down by nine heavens of divine punishment lightning! The karmic backlash alone could shatter your meridian pathways!"
"Defiles?" Austin snorted, pulling his metric socket ratchet from his leather holster with a practiced flick. "Who's defiling? I'm salvaging decommissioned enterprise hardware from an unmaintained facility! You know what happens to high-density server blades when you leave them idle in a cold mountain vault for ten thousand years? The electrolytic filter capacitors dry out, the thermal paste turns into chalky talc, and the cooling manifolds rot from biological sludge. Leaving them here to seize up is practically a felony in facility engineering ethics."
Austin dragged his two-wheeled steel handcart into the center aisle: *Squeak-clatter.*
He unslung his heavy canvas rucksack, pulled out a thick roll of braided nylon pull-string and a wooden cable spool, then snapped a 14mm deep-well chrome-vanadium socket onto the ratchet drive. He tested the pawl mechanism with two crisp, metallic clicks: *CLICK-CLICK.*
"Xiaoyao, grab the label maker and the yellow grease pencil," Austin barked, pointing toward the side pouch of his cart. "We're stripping the primary compute cluster. Floor 1's server terminal back at Sunset Peak is choking on automated blast furnace readings. With twelve of these First Epoch blades, we can automate the slag drainage valves, run closed-loop PID control on the draft blowers, and deploy optical sorting on five hundred tons of raw iron ore every single hour."
"A-Automating... the sacred furnace of the heavens?!" Xiaoyao squeaked, his pupils dilating as he instinctively clutched the yellow grease pencil like a live talisman. "Senior, what is a... a PID control? Is it an ancient forbidden incantation to bind the fire spirits of the earth?"
"It's proportional-integral-derivative math, kid," Austin muttered, pulling a pair of safety glasses from his pocket and wiping the dust off the lenses with his shirttail. "You got a wood stove damper and a boiling teakettle. If the kettle starts screaming, you don't yank the damper shut and freeze the room; you nudge it just enough so the water simmers without boiling dry. A PID loop does that forty times a second without needing an apprentice standing there getting soot in his eyes. Now pay attention."
Austin dropped to one knee before the first rack: *Clomp.*
With steady, practiced hands, he reached into the rear service bay and decoupled the primary liquid-cooling supply lines:
*TSSSSST-POP.*
The spring-loaded brass dry-break couplings snapped shut with an airtight seal. Bone dry. Zero leaks, zero drip onto the terrazzo floor.
"Clean break," Austin muttered, checking the seal face. "Look at that Viton gasket. Still pliant. No dry-rot, no swelling. Quality manufacturing."
Next, Austin unthreaded the four captive thumbscrews on the rack ears:
*Click, click, click, click.*
He reached into the chassis with both gloved hands, gripped the heavy titanium pull handles, and eased the sixty-pound server blade forward along its telescoping slides:
*SCHWWWWIIIIIP.*
The chassis glided out smooth as butter. Inside lay banks of multi-faceted quantum crystals, gold-plated bus connectors, and hermetically sealed solid-state crystalline storage drives pulsing with faint azure light.
Austin took his yellow grease pencil from behind his ear and wrote across the top alloy lid in neat block letters:
`[FLOOR 5 SALVAGE - NODE 01 - AUTOMATED BLAST FURNACE CONTROLLER]`
He lifted the blade clear of the slides, turned, and set it squarely onto the bed of his handcart atop a thick quilted moving blanket:
*THUD.*
"Node one secured," Austin muttered, wiping his brow with the back of his canvas glove. "Pins are dead straight. Bus contacts look brand new. Zero scorching on the edge connectors."
Li Xiaoyao watched in dazed horror as the legendary "Sacred Stele of the Heavens"—an object that emperors had launched holy crusades just to glimpse through a mirror—was unbolted with a hand tool, tagged with grease pencil, and loaded onto a handcart like bags of ready-mix cement.
"Senior..." Xiaoyao stammered, his fingers trembling against the label roll. "Are we... are we not even going to offer a single cup of spiritual wine to appease the spirit of the stele?"
"The stele doesn't drink wine, Xiaoyao," Austin sighed, already unthreading the thumbscrews on rack two. "It runs on three-phase four-hundred-and-eighty-volt alternating current. What it needs is fresh thermal paste and clean copper busbars."
Austin didn't slow down.
*Click-whir-click-whir!*
*SCHWWWWIIIP!*
*THUD!*
Node two: `[NODE 02: PELTON TURBINE RPM REGULATOR]`.
Node three: `[NODE 03: HYDRAULIC FORGING PRESS VALVE GAUGES]`.
Node four: `[NODE 04: CERBERUS PUG AUTOMATED KIBBLE DISPENSER]`.
By the time Austin reached Node eight, he had stripped the entire front bay down to its bare titanium uprights.
He didn't stop with the computing blades, either. Austin shimmied up the side of the rack like an experienced lineman working a utility pole. Reaching into the overhead Unistrut trapeze, he hooked his five-foot Stellar-Steel pipe wrench around a union coupling, planted his boot against the steel strut, and backed off a thirty-foot length of seamless titanium cooling pipe:
*CREAK-SNAP!*
He lowered the pipe carefully to Xiaoyao, who caught the heavy metal cylinder with a grunt, stumbling backward under its weight.
Next, Austin unspooled four hundred meters of armored orange fiber-optic trunk line, winding it around the cedar spindle with steady, even pressure, keeping a strict three-inch minimum bend radius:
"Always watch your minimum bend radius on optical trunks, Xiaoyao," Austin called down, spinning the wooden spool with his thumb. "You kink or pinch that glass core cladding, your refractive index goes crooked and your signal attenuation falls off a cliff. High packet loss over long runs will get you kicked off my crew faster than dropping a framing hammer down an open duct."
"I... I shall carve the Law of the Minimum Bend Radius into my very marrow, Senior!" Xiaoyao swore, his face slick with nervous sweat as he braced the spool against his shins.
Austin stacked four titanium cryogenic heat exchangers, sixteen high-pressure brass ball valves, and twelve pristine quantum blades onto the cart. The heavy steel cart groaned under nearly three thousand pounds of First Epoch alloy, held completely stable by the localized sixteen-G gravitational field humming around Austin's shins.
He hooked his heavy-duty ratchet tie-down straps to the cart frame and cranked the handles with sharp, rhythmic clicks:
*CLICK-CLACK-CLICK-CLACK.*
"Now that," Austin smiled, patting the stacked server chassis with genuine contractor pride, "is what I call a proper hardware refresh. Sunset Peak's compute capacity just jumped four hundred percent. We'll have automated monitoring across all five floors before Tuesday afternoon."
High overhead, the soft amber lighting panels in the ceiling flashed violently to a harsh, strobe-pulsing crimson.
A deafening horn tore through the quiet of the subterranean room:
*WHEEEEE-OOOOH! WHEEEEE-OOOOH! WHEEEEE-OOOOH!*
A cold, synthesized mechanical voice barked through the acoustic ceiling baffles, vibrating the titanium uprights:
**[CRITICAL ALERT: UNAUTHORIZED SYSTEM HARDWARE DISASSEMBLY DETECTED IN RESEARCH SECTOR B]** **[EQUIPMENT LOSS REGISTERED: 12x QUANTUM COMPUTE BLADES / 4x CRYOGENIC HEAT EXCHANGERS]** **[ASSET THEFT CLASSIFICATION: CLASS-A INFRASTRUCTURE SABOTAGE]** **[DISPATCHING AUTOMATED FACILITY SECURITY COUNTERMEASURES IMMEDIATELY]**
Across the high ceiling, forty circular maintenance ports popped open with a synchronized pneumatic hiss:
*PSSSSSSSHHHHH!*
Dozens of gleaming metallic spheres dropped out of the dark vents, catching themselves on buzzing gyroscopic gimbals. Deployable side panels slid back to reveal blinding violet plasma lances that crackled with raw, unbuffered electromagnetic static.
Li Xiaoyao whipped his flying sword from its scabbard, his face pale as fresh bone as his sword-intent flared in frantic desperation:
"Senior! The ancestral guardians have awoken! The Celestial Slaughter Spheres of the Ancient Heavens! They will dissolve our souls down to the bone!"
Austin looked up toward the ceiling, resting his hands casually on his denim hips:
"Slaughter spheres? Those are automated facility patrol drones," Austin sighed, shaking his head. "And their response time is an absolute joke. Twenty-five whole minutes to register an unbolted server rack? If an industrial warehouse in Chicago had security that sluggish, the insurance underwriter would cancel the policy before the sun went down."