The systematic disarming of an entire royal assault army produced a harvest of high-grade sky metal the likes of which the refugees had never dreamed.
Along the dry banded limestone terrace of Entry hall 120, a mountain of captured weapons was growing by the hour. Twelve refugee smiths, their aprons blackened with coal-dust, sorted the salvaged arms into neat, towering piles. Three thousand eight hundred and forty void-steel broadswords and curved cutlasses. Eight hundred and forty repeating air-powered crossbows. Six hundred heavy bronze axe-spear-heads. And forty-two tons of hardened armor plates, brass gears, and copper steam-pipes stripped from the drowned command-cars.
Yan Zhiqiu stood atop an overturned ammunition chest, her broken slate resting against her knee, checking off each wagon-load with a piece of white chalk.
“Take the repeating gears from the crossbows first,” she directed a squad of adolescent boys who were working with copper pliers. “The internal bronze springs are forged from high-stretch sea-copper. They can be adapted to trigger the balance-valves of the upper water tanks. Stack the void-steel blades in the third nook. The blacksmiths in Entry hall 111 will forge them into shovels, stone-chisels, and deep-water fish-spears.”
A teenage refugee girl ran up to the crate, holding up an amazing two-handed broadsword whose handle knob was set with a thumb-sized sky sapphire that glowed with inner blue fire.
