The subterranean mining lift plunged smoothly through the planet’s crust, shielded by Master Lu Jian’s golden kinetic wards.
Inside the lift, Old Granite held his newly regenerated Starlight Jade-Mechanoid Arm before his eyes. Crafted from deep-vein astral jade and flexible dwarf spirit-alloys by Dr. Gu Qinghe and Forge-King Tie-Ran, the prosthetic arm gleamed with soft golden light and pulsed in harmony with his rocky heartbeat.
He opened and closed the five jade fingers, listening to the smooth, silent hum of the internal pneumatic joints.
“Thirty years,” Old Granite murmured, his deep voice thick with emotion. “For thirty years, I swung a pickaxe with one arm and learned to sleep on one side. I had forgotten what it felt like to have two hands.”
“Now you can hold two bowls of Grandma Chen’s soup at the same time,” Lin Mo said with a smile. “Efficiency is very important in Taichu Group.”
The lift passed the fifty-mile mark, then one hundred miles, plunging deep into the planetary mantle.
The surrounding rock shifted from cold black ironstone to glowing, translucent basalt. Heat shimmers rippled outside the transparent shield, but the interior cabin remained at a pleasant twenty-two degrees.
At five hundred miles below the surface, the lift gently decelerated and clicked into an ancient stone docking ring.
