Entry hall 441 was an ancient metalworking annex whose walls were lined with tool racks of stone-hard ash wood, holding stone measuring tongs, bronze screw-plates, and oil-cooled cold chisels forged during the First Epoch.
In the center of the hall, resting upon two heavy frame stands of dark hard black rock dark rock, lay the dismembered torso of the Alpha Hound.
The beast had been stripped of its crushed limbs, its battered rear plates, and its cut air-powered lines. What remained upon the bench was its main clockwork chassis. A four-foot metal tube of soul-forged dark bronze, six spans in outer rim, heavy with internal inner walls of cold-rolled star-fallen iron.
Qiao Ming stood beside the bench, his sleeves rolled up to the shoulders, his bare calloused hands holding an eight-pound copper mallet and an oil-hardened bronze wedge.
The air in the workshop was warm, dry, and scented with cedar shavings and ancient machine oil. Beside the bench, Yan Zhiqiu stood with a slate tally board resting across her forearm, a sharp pencil of white chalk held ready in her fingers to record every component as it was pulled out from the iron carcass.
“Every machine tells the story of the hands that forged it,” Qiao Ming said, his voice quiet, steady, and ringing in the dry air. “Look at the rivets along the dorsal seam. They were driven by an apprentice whose hammer was too light. Each head is mushroomed unevenly, showing that the metal was worked while it…
