The capital engineering room had one long table and not enough space for all the maps. Qiao Wen pushed the supply tallies to the center, while Qinghe rolled out the furnace diagrams. Gu brought the old routing sheets, and Bai and Ning arrived with road and shelter counts.
Wei assigned trained formation crews to the outer stations. “Each team needs a road back to a staffed shelter. We cannot install a node and leave its keepers without a route.”
Ning set her clinic list beside Han’s map. The shelter counts showed one site that could receive patients and another that could hold supplies only.
“If a node is beside a village, we need to know where the residents can go if its barrier is cut,” she said. “Capacity comes before installation.”
Qinghe marked the safer channels. Gu identified old furnace lines that could be reused and those that had to be abandoned. Bai charted the roads for spirit stones and copper conduit. The plan now showed not only what they would build but who could reach it and who would operate it.
Qiao asked how many nodes the first build could support. Qinghe proposed three types: anchor furnaces to draw and distribute energy, relay pylons to carry readings, and local barriers that could disconnect without collapsing adjacent sites.
