The roaring crash of falling water echoed between the sheer granite cliffs of the Southern Defile. It filled the narrow gorge with cool white spray. Here, the Clear-Stone River cut through the bedrock like an ancient jade blade, carving a passage barely sixty paces wide between straight-across stone walls that rose five hundred feet into the sky.
This narrow gorge was the southern threshold of the Grand Desolate Spirit Forest. Beyond it lay the very thirsty, sun-baked shale ridges and thorny scrub of the demonic borderlands. If Elder Han Gu intended to march an army of one hundred thousand corrupted beasts into the safe hall’s agricultural basin, this roaring aquatic hall was the only path that could accommodate the sheer mass of heavy infantry and siege beasts.
Lin Xiao bounced along the rocky shoreline, his azure surface reflecting the foamy rapids. Floating beside him at the edge of the deep pool was Xiao Long, the horned river serpent. The thirty-meter sky wyrm rested his great sapphire-scaled chin against a mossy boulder. His golden whiskers drifted lazily in the cold mountain current. Meanwhile, his nascent dragon horns caught the afternoon sun.
Behind them, the ground shuddered under heavy, rhythmic thuds.
Tie Shan marched down the gorge trail, flanked by a dozen burly earth-bear smiths. The seven-foot elder blacksmith was stripped to the waist, his thick, slate-grey fur glistening with sweat, his massive star-iron right arm gleaming with faint golden star-pattern runes. Balanced effortlessly across his broad shoulders were four massive beams of refined meteor-iron, each four feet thick and thirty feet long, forged in the fiery smelting pits beneath the mountain.
“Ho! Sovereign!” Tie Shan boomed, his gravelly voice cutting through the roar of the rapids like rolling thunder. With a grunt of hard effort, he tossed the four multi-ton iron beams onto the gravel bank. It sent a cloud of river spray into the air. “The boys and I have hammered out twelve sets of linked iron grates from the meteor-core stock! If those demonic bastards try to march through this creek, they’ll find their teeth rattling against the hardest metal in the southern province!”
“Good work, Elder Tie,” Lin Xiao said, wobbling approvingly. “A solid front door is the first rule of good housekeeping. But we aren’t just building a wall. We’re building a water-flow control choke-point.”
Tie Shan scratched his thick, braided beard with a massive claw, blinking in confusion. “Hydro-what now, Sovereign?”
“A water trap, Elder Tie,” Lin Xiao explained, bobbing in a cheerful circle. “If you build a solid wall, the river water backs up, floods our own lower pear orchards, and eventually bursts under deep water pressure. What we want is an intelligent water gate network: three tiered sets of underwater iron grates that allow clean water to flow through freely, but can be dropped in three seconds to block swimming shock troops, wedge heavy beasts in deep silt, and create counter-current whirlpools.”
Tie Shan’s small dark eyes widened, then crinkled with a wide, loud grin. He slammed his huge forging hammer into the sand, chuckling from the bottom of his belly. “A water sieve that drowns their charge while keeping our farms dry! By the mountain spirits, Sovereign, you have the mind of a master siege master builder!”
“Actually, it’s just basic civil drainage logistics,” Lin Xiao muttered inwardly. “In my past life, we used trash racks and storm water gates on town spillways all the time to keep debris from clogging the shipping locks. It’s the same principle, just with more angry demonic rhinos.”
“Let’s get to work,” Lin Xiao announced out loud. “Xiao Long, take the riverbed foundation. Tie Shan, set the outer guide rails.”
The azure horned serpent let out a low, melodic whistle that rang with the elemental spirit of the water. Coiling his massive, thirty-meter body, Xiao Long plunged into the foaming center of the rapids. His sapphire scales gleamed beneath the emerald current as he opened his jaws. He exhaled a swirling stream of packed water-spirit qi directly into the rocky riverbed.
The rushing current obeyed his will instantly. The roaring rapids separated, peeling back from the center of the gorge like curtains of silk to reveal the bare, polished solid mountain stone beneath. With his long claws, Xiao Long dredged out three deep transverse foundation trenches across the gorge floor, each five paces wide and ten feet deep, cutting deep sockets into the sheer cliff walls on either side.
Tie Shan and his earth-bear apprentices waded waist-deep into the diverted shallows. He carried the massive meteor-iron grates.
Working with frightening care and brute physical power, Tie Shan hammered the iron base-plates into the bedrock sockets. His five-hundred-jin smithing hammer dropped with rhythmic, earth-shaking booms: CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! With each strike, sparks the size of teacups flew from the cold metal. It drove anchor pins deep into the living stone until the iron beams became one with the mountain.
Between the iron bars, the bear artisans installed heavy bronze winches equipped with balance weight pulleys and spring-loaded locking teeth. Each gate stood forty feet tall, composed of thick, closely spaced meteor-iron bars capable of withstanding the direct charge of a mountain mammoth. Retractable, forward-facing iron-hard metal pikes were set along the lower third of the grates, designed to deter underwater tunneling beasts.
The second and third tiers of water gate gates were anchored into place. Then, Xiao Long circled back, blowing gentle spiraling currents through the sub-surface channels. Guided by Lin Xiao’s precise water-flow instructions, Xiao Long carved a series of curved bending baffles into the underwater stone banks. The river flowed over these baffles at high volume. Then, it would naturally generate powerful underwater vortices. Violent undertows that would drag any creature attempting to swim the defile downward into the deep silt trenches.
Within Lin Xiao’s mind, the Dao Spirit calculated the clockwork tolerances in real-time, chiming softly:
Tie Shan climbed out of the water onto the gravel bank. It shook river spray from his thick fur like a wet dog. He wiped cold water from his brow with his star-iron forearm, admiring the towering tiered gates spanning the gorge. The dark, polished iron bars gleamed in the fading afternoon light, anchored so solidly into the canyon walls that they looked as if they had grown there since the dawn of creation.
“That’s an amazing piece of ironwork,” Tie Shan rumbled, his chest swelling with artisan pride. “Even an Early Nascent Soul elder hammering at these gates with a flying sword would need three days to chip through three tiers of meteor-iron. But Sovereign, how do we know the locking winches will hold when the river hits full flood?”
Lin Xiao bounced up to the edge of the highest granite overlook, forty feet above the upper pool.
“Only one way to find out,” Lin Xiao said cheerfully. “Time for a water-pressure stress test.”
Lin Xiao took a deep breath—or rather, activated the Ancient Chaos Void within his core. His semi-clear sapphire mass swelled outward like an inflating blue sail. Diving headfirst into the upper river pool, he opened his intake sky-slit wide.
SCHWROOOOOOM!
A huge whirlpool formed in the upper basin. Within five heartbeats, Lin Xiao swallowed over eighty thousand cubic feet of rushing mountain river water, storing the huge liquid volume inside the limitless spatial folds of his dantian. The riverbed above the water gate temporarily drained to a trickle, revealing smooth river pebbles and startled minnows.
“Stand clear of the splash zone, everyone!” Lin Xiao called out, floating above the canyon on a cushion of high-pressure water vapor.
He tightly packed his inner void pressure. He condensed the eighty thousand cubic feet of stored water into a dense, hyper-high-pressure high-pressure metal tube, then released the entire deluge down the canyon in a single total wave!
A roaring wall of white water, forty feet high and carrying fifty thousand tons of moving driving force, thundered down the gorge like an angry liquid dragon!
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
The massive tidal wave slammed wildly into the first tier of meteor-iron water gate gates. The impact sounded like an artillery shell exploding in an enclosed cave, throwing blinding sheets of white spray two hundred feet into the air. The thick iron grates shuddered wildly, their bronze locking teeth grinding against the bedrock anchors with a high-pitched metal shriek.
Tie Shan and his bear apprentices braced their legs against the rocks, watching with held breath.
The water pressure built behind the first gate. But before it could overwhelm the structure, Lin Xiao’s water-flow baffles engaged. The water was forced sideways through the lateral relief channels. It spiraled into violent underwater vortices that faded away ninety percent of the forward striking force before spilling cleanly through the second and third tiers into the lower riverbed.
Within thirty seconds, the deluge had passed, flowing harmlessly down the southern river flats in a smooth, rapid current.
The three tiers of meteor-iron gates stood fully unbroken, their upright bars straight and true, without a single tiny fraction of an inch of bowing or load-bearing warping.
“IT HELD!” Tie Shan roared in triumph, pumping his star-iron fist into the air with a laugh that rattled the canyon walls. The bear apprentices cheered, banging their mallets against their breastplates in loud celebration.
Xiao Long surfaced beside the lower pool, his golden eyes shining as he nuzzled his massive snout affectionately against Lin Xiao’s rubbery blue dome. The horned serpent let out a happy draconic chuff, thoroughly enjoying the artificial flood.
Lin Xiao wobbled back down to the gravel bank. It shook off the leftover droplets with a contented wiggle.
“Tolerances are well within safety margins,” Lin Xiao noted happily. “The flow rate is stable, the winches are smooth. The whirlpool trenches work exactly as planned. Now, if Elder Han Gu wants to bring his one hundred thousand beasts through our front door, he’ll have to learn how to swim through a high-pressure washing machine.”
Just as the bear smiths began gathering their tools to head back for dinner, a sharp, piercing sound cut through the roar of the rapids.
It wasn’t the wind. It was a high, desperate, warbling whistle echoing from the southern river flats several miles downstream. A whistle that repeated in rapid, wild pulses. It was followed by the distant, chilling baying of blood-thirsty hounds.