The shearing of the two-hundred-pound bronze pipe rim bolt was merely the opening salvo of a total heavy-duty failure.
For five hundred years, the Great Da-Qi Empire had prided itself on the invincibility of its stone-built achievements. The Imperial Pill Plaza, paved with six-inch slabs of fiery dark rock and blessed by three ages of Daoist formation grandmasters, was designed to withstand the siege engines of hostile land-wide kingdoms. Yet within ten seconds of the Nine-Dragon Cauldron entering runaway deep ring, the sacred square had become a theater of pure world-ending ruin.
Where the massive bolt had crushed through the judging pavilion, seventy-year-old cedar roof beams burned with fierce purple fire. Shattered decorative tiles cascaded across the marble stairs like falling hail, crushing jade tables and driving high royal judges into the dirt.
Where the massive bolt had been ripped from the upper collar of the thirty-foot Nine-Dragon Primordial Cauldron, a pencil-thick jet of blazing bright purple star-fire shrieked into the sky. It hissed at faster-than-sound speed, drilling a glowing hole straight through the low-hanging morning storm clouds like a packed laser beam, vaporizing the moisture in the air and filling the arena with the sharp, choking stench of ozone.
Below, the Imperial Pill Plaza had ceased to be a venue of dignified sporting competition.
It was now an active, uncontained total blast zone.
Two hundred thousand spectators thrashed in blind, choking panic. Fighters whose names struck terror across thirty commanderies shoved past weeping merchant apprentices. Grand sect masters trampled their own stitched silk banners. And the grand tiered staircases became a churning bottleneck of scared humanity jamming into the narrow outer edge arches like grains of wheat clogging an ungreased grain chute.
High on the royal viewing balcony, sixty elite Golden Dragon Guards formed a linked wall of heavy iron tower shields around Emperor Yan and the Dowager Empress, attempting to force the sovereign monarchs toward the underground escape tunnels.
“Your Imperial Majesty! Step into the fortified vault!” the Commander of the Guards pleaded, his iron gauntlets shaking wildly against the sound blast waves rippling through the marble. “The old family cooking pot has entered uncontained demonic deep ring! If the hull shears, fifteen square miles of the capital will be wiped from the royal maps!”
Emperor Yan shoved the commander’s shield aside with a furious sweep of his armored arm, his bloodshot eyes locked onto the stage floor below: “Where is Master Lu?! Where is the Savior of the Empire?! Is he safe behind the stone barriers?!”
Chief Arbiter Pill King Dan Kui clung to the marble balcony rail, his knuckles bone-white, his yellow builder hard hat rattling against his forehead: “He... He’s still at his station! Look at him! He hasn’t moved an inch!”
Beside the Emperor, the Dowager Empress Yan leaned against the stone railing, holding Frank’s stainless-steel thermos in her wrinkled hands, her gaze calm: “Don’t shout like a scared schoolboy, Yan’er. Look at Master Lu’s stance. He has his clipboard out. A craftsman with a clipboard in his hands is never afraid of hot iron.”
Twenty yards from the shrieking bronze giant beast, Frank sat calmly in his light metal folding lawn chair.
Through his shade-five dark-tinted welding goggles, the world was cast in a cool, emerald-gray hue that stripped away the blinding glare of the dragon fire. It showed the pure load-bearing mechanics of the impending explosion.
Frank held his light metal clipboard steady on his knee, his red carpenter’s pencil dancing across the ruled lines of his defect log.
Scritch. Scritch. Scritch.
Beside him, Shen Shitou stood like an unmoving mountain anchor. He held his twenty-pound forged sledgehammer ready to deflect any flying shrapnel. Princess Jiang Ling’er had her safety glasses lowered. Her brass valve-wrench was clenched in both gloved hands. Meanwhile, Niu Mang stood firmly behind the two-wheeled pine cart. She anchored the axle into the granite with the flat blade of his trench shovel.
In Frank’s eyes, the Heavenly Bug Tracker screen flashed with nonstop, real-time test tracking data!
“Look at the pressure slope, crew,” Frank said calmly through his yellow foam earplugs, his voice as relaxed as an approved checker giving a routine vocational lecture. “Seven thousand two hundred... Nine thousand four hundred... Eleven thousand two hundred PSI. The rate of pressure gaining speed is non-linear.”
Frank pointed his red pencil toward the bulging bronze hull, explaining the failure mechanics to his students:
“Take note of the crystal-clear creep warping. Ancient tin-bronze has high rusting pushback. But its pulling yield strength drops by eighty percent when heat exceeds six hundred degrees. When you heat an unvented hull to four million Degrees of star-heat, the tin segregates along the grain boundaries, acting like liquid grease between the copper crystals. The metal loses all holding power.”
Princess Ling’er monitored the heat slope on her pad: “Master, the southern quarter-panel where you drew the chalk ‘X’ is glowing cherry-red! The heat on that face has spiked past four million Degrees of star-heat!”
“That’s the tiny thin spot from the bad sand-casting mold,” Frank nodded. “The thinner the wall, the faster the heat transfers, and the higher the nearby hoop stress. Hoop stress equals internal pressure times radius divided by wall thickness. Basic thin-walled pressure vessel formula.”
On the central stage fifteen yards away, Grandmaster Ouyang was crawling across the scorched stone on his hands and knees.
His ornate crimson robes had caught fire from the radiant backdraft. It burned away to reveal blistered skin and blackened undergarments. His eyebrows and beard were fully singed to ash, his fingers clawing at the molten bronze control panel in a state of weeping, frantic madness.
“Put out it! In the name of the ancestors, put out the flames!” Ouyang shrieked, his voice cracking into a high-pitched, pathetic whimper.
The leftover three senior grandmasters wildly threw buckets of spiritual ice water and hurled hundred-year water magic charms at the intake chimney pipes.
BOOM-HISS!
The ice water didn’t put out the flames. It suffered immediate overload flash vaporization!
The sudden blast of white-hot steam exploded back into the grandmasters’ faces, launching them thirty feet across the stage like ragdolls, their bodies slamming into the stone barriers with sickening thuds, their robes burning in the ash!
Ouyang looked at the main magma control lever.
The heavy bronze lever had melted into a distorted lump of purple melted rock waste, fusing the intake gates permanently open to the mantle of the earth!
“The valve is fused!” Ouyang screamed, tearing at his own hair until bloody clumps came away in his fingers. “The Earth Dragon has cut its sky reins! The cooking pot is feeding on the underground magma ley-line! It won’t close! It won’t close!”
Ouyang looked toward the high VIP stands, screaming to the fleeing ministers: “Save me! The cooking pot is going to burst! The royal capital will be flattened into a lake of fire!”
The high-hum shaking streaming from the bronze hull suddenly shifted from a low roar to a faster-than-sound, ear-piercing whistle!
WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
The sound shook at exactly one hundred and forty hertz—a ringing pitch of pure, packed moving violence!
Across the royal stands, the sound pressure wave struck with physical force.
Every jade teacup, every fine china plate, every glass lantern, and every decorative scrying mirror within a half-mile radius in a heartbeat exploded into thousands of sparkling, powdery fragments! Even the heavy stained-glass skylights along the upper row of stone pillars shattered in a cascading waterfall of colored crystal shards!
“My ears! My head!” fighters screamed, clutching their bleeding ears as they tumbled down the tiered arena steps.
The panic reached a fever pitch.
Two hundred thousand people surged against the outer edge walls like stampeding cattle, abandoning carriages, spirit beasts, and millions of spirit stones in their desperate bid to put miles between themselves and the screaming bronze monster.
Yet right in the center of the shaking plaza, beside the pine cart with its four bright orange safety cones, Frank calmly closed his clipboard.
Frank pulled his red carpenter’s pencil from behind his ear and slipped it into the front pocket of his overalls.
He looked down at his wrist watch.
It was 10:14 AM.
“One hundred and twenty seconds to fifteen thousand PSI,” Frank said deadpan.
Frank stood up from his folding lawn chair, took off his shade-five welding goggles for a second to wipe the sweat from the bridge of his nose. Then he snapped them back over his eyes.
Frank turned to his students: “Shitou, keep the safety outer edge clear. Ling’er, prepare the grounding rods. Niu Mang, hold the cart steady.”
“Master!” Princess Ling’er cried, her voice trembling not with fear for herself, but with breathless concern for her teacher. “The heat thickness in the blast core is exceeding four million Degrees of star-heat! If you step onto the pad—”
Frank looked down at his work boots. He tapped the steel toe against the trembling flat stone slabs with a soft, confident smile.
“A four-million-degree heat spike and fifteen thousand PSI of squeezing,” Frank murmured. His eyes glowed behind the dark glass. “Do you have any idea how much a heavy-duty lab charges to rent a steam-cleaner with those specs? It’s fully free, and the Potion-maker Guild is footing the fuel bill.”
Frank reached into his canvas tool bag. Then he pulled out his twenty-four-inch heavy-duty drop-forged steel pipe wrench and his trusty eight-ounce brass ball-peen hammer.
He gave the knurled shift collar of the pipe wrench a firm, practiced spin with his thumb. He set the hardened alloy jaws to the exact outer width of the south intake coupling. Then, Frank twirled the brass hammer between his fingers, checking the striking face for any burrs or pitting that could deflect an impact strike.
“Tool clearance checked,” Frank muttered, clipping his red pencil into his chest pocket. “Time to conduct an emergency uncoupling on an unpermitted pressure vessel.”
Across the shaking arena, Emperor Yan watched from the royal balcony, his heart caught in his throat as the lone craftsman strode into the inferno. To the two hundred thousand fleeing fighters, Frank looked like a suicidal madman throwing his life away in the flames. But to the Emperor, that straight, unbowed back in denim overalls looked like the solitary pillar holding up the sky.
Frank stepped past the orange safety cones, his boots crunching over the scorched cobblestones. He walked with measured, rhythmic strides directly toward the howling, white-hot bronze behemoth.