The three-headed Imperial Blood-War-Eagle lay motionless upon the flat stone slabs of the carriage house courtyard.
Its massive wings, spanning thirty feet of midnight-black plumage, were riddled with golf-ball-sized acid burns. Thick, acid-burning black ichor hissed against the granite paving stones, eating tiny pits into the rock before the beast let out a final, shuddering rattle and went still.
Shen Shitou knelt beside the fallen creature, his heavy cowhide gloves coated in neutral baking soda slurry to stop the acid.
With steady fingers, he pried open the eagle’s curled steel talons.
He lifted a six-inch tube-shaped courier canister carved from dense blood-jade. The surface of the stone was so hot it scorched the leather of his glove, venting thin ribbons of rotten-egg steam into the midnight air.
“High-priority dispatch, Master,” Shitou reported. He rose to his feet and presenting the canister on both palms. “Courier bird suffered total collapse upon approach. Airframe destroyed. Cargo intact.”
Frank wiped his hands on a clean cotton rag and took the blood-jade metal tube.
Under his Level 35 test vision, the tamper seal glowed with a wild, pulsing red warning bright light. It was locked with the three-dragon emergency imprint of the Imperial Northern Border Army. A military dispatch protocol reserved only for total land-wide collapse.
Frank pressed his thumb against the wax seal.
A tiny spark from his thumbnail star-fire flame melted the blood-wax in a split second:
HISS.
The jade metal tube popped open with a sharp sound crack, releasing a cloud of crimson incense smoke that swelled into a three-space-folding spiritual projection.
In the center of the courtyard, the towering light-projected image of General Meng flickered into life.
The supreme commander of Great Da-Qi’s northern defenses stood atop a shattered black glass low roof wall amidst a raging arctic blizzard. Behind him, the midnight sky was torn open by violent, jagged streaks of black acid-burning lightning.
His heavy dragon-scale armor was melted at the shoulder, revealing raw, blistered flesh. His helmet was gone. And his left hand gripped a notched, bloodstained broadsword.
“Emergency dispatch to the Royal Capital!” General Meng roared, his voice trembling through the static interference. “Code Vermilion! I repeat, Code Vermilion!”
The general coughed wildly, spitting a mouthful of black, congealed blood onto the low roof wall before continuing:
“The Great Northern Heaven-Locking Barrier—the ten-thousand-mile defensive ward protecting the mortal realm—has suffered a total load-bearing fracture along Section Seven!”
Behind the general, the projection panned across a terrifying vista.
A huge wall of golden light, towering ten thousand feet into the stratosphere, stretched across the northern horizon.
Except the golden wall was no longer solid.
A massive, jagged fissure over thirty miles wide had ripped through the glowing barrier. From the pitch-black depths of the Deep-sea Deep gap below, a writhing, screeching black tide of tens of millions of void-insects and underground fiends was pouring through the breach like boiling tar!
“The Northern Formation Masters Guild has suffered total ruin!” General Meng screamed over the screeching wind. “All eighty high formation elders were boiled away inside the main control nexus! When the north node overloaded, a massive wave of sky lightning bounced backward through the spirit vein lines! The entire switchboard blew up in an arc flashover!”
An ear-splitting explosion rocked the low roof wall in the background, showering the general in burning shards of formation crystal.
“The northern armies are falling back to the second stronghold!” General Meng shouted desperately, his eyes wide with grim terror. “The ward energy is dropping by five percent every hour! If the land-wide grid collapses fully, the void swarm will sweep past the border guard posts and reach the royal capital within thirty days! Send reinforcement formations! By the ancestors... Send—”
KRA-BOOOOOOOOM!
A blinding bolt of black lightning tore through the projection. The light-projected feed dissolved into static snow. The blood-jade metal tube in Frank’s hand shattered into fine crimson dust.
Silence dropped over the courtyard.
Jiang Ling’er took a step back, her face pale as freshly poured plaster:
“The Heaven-Locking Barrier...” Ling’er whispered, her voice trembling. “It was erected three thousand years ago by the First Emperor and the old family formation gods. It’s the only thing that separates the human realm from the infinite void beast tide! If the barrier falls, Great Da-Qi... The entire Eastern Continent will be wiped from existence!”
Niu Mang gripped his brass measuring tongs until his knuckles turned white:
“Eighty formation grandmasters boiled away in an instant,” Niu Mang murmured, terror in his eyes. “What kind of ancient demonic curse could destroy eighty Nascent Soul formation elders through their own array?”
Shen Shitou stood beside Frank, his jaw set like an iron anvil: “Master, what’s your command? Shall we prepare defensive barricades around Ironwood Peak?”
Frank didn’t look frightened.
He stood with his arms crossed, staring at the empty air where the projection had just hovered.
Through his newly unlocked Level 35 screen, Frank had activated [Bulk Archive Scraping] during the brief seconds the general’s signal had played.
The Heavenly Bug Tracker had captured twenty-four high-resolution frames of the background formation nexus, digitizing the ancient runic schematics carved into the black glass towers into a full spark one-line diagram.
Frank shook his head, letting out a heavy, fed up sigh.
“Demonic curse?” Frank said, his voice flat as a carpenter’s level. “That wasn’t a demonic curse. That was a floating neutral line and a total ground fault.”
Niu Mang blinked: “A... Floating neutral?”
“Look at the wiring diagram,” Frank said, gesturing dismissively at the lingering smoke. “Three thousand years ago, whoever designed that ten-thousand-mile high-voltage array ran the entire defensive grid on an ungrounded delta configuration.”
Frank pulled his pencil from behind his ear and sketched rapidly on Niu Mang’s clipboard:
“They installed ten thousand miles of active current-carrying wards, drawing millions of kilowatts of surrounding spiritual energy from the underground ley lines. But they didn’t drive a single earth grounding rod into the bedrock. They had zero equipment grounding conductors, no bonded neutral bus, no surge arrestors, and not a single circuit breaker on the main feeder line.”
Frank tapped the sketch with the eraser.
“For three thousand years, capacitive charging current has been building up along that ten-thousand-mile run without anywhere to discharge,” Frank explained deadpan. “Then a high-energy lightning strike hit the Section Seven collector tower. With no low-flow pushback ground path to earth, the entire voltage spike bounced right back down the signal line into the control bunker.”
“When eighty formation elders tried to channel the spike with their bare hands,” Frank added, “they became the lowest-flow pushback path to ground. The current arced straight through their bodies. They weren’t cursed by void demons. They were electrocuted because the Royal Ministry of Works neglected routine spark upkeep for five hundred years.”
The three students stared at Frank with wide, unblinking eyes.
Electrocuted by lack of routine upkeep!
The divine barrier of the founding emperors was not broken by the wrath of the heavens. It failed because of town fault and poor grounding!
Niu Mang adjusted his glasses, his mind racing to process the cosmic discovery: “Master... Can a ten-thousand-mile land-wide defensive grid be repaired?”
“It’s just an ungrounded electric fence with a blown step-down transformer,” Frank said calmly. “First, we clear the ground fault. Second, we drive sixty-foot solid copper grounding rods into the bedrock every five miles along the outer edge. Third, we install heavy-duty high-pressure trip-breakers to isolate faulted sections so the entire continent doesn’t go dark when a single node shorts out.”
Frank checked his pocket watch.
“It’s twelve-fifteen,” Frank announced. “The royal logistics convoy is already assembling sixty barges of mountain hardwood, ten thousand tons of fiery high-pressure cement, and five hundred miles of twelve-gauge copper wire at the river docks. That’s no longer our workshop spreading stock. That’s our mobile grid repair inventory.”
Frank reached down and cinched his heavy leather tool belt tight around his waist:
CLICK.
He grabbed his twenty-four-inch heavy cast-iron pipe wrench and his hardened steel wire-strippers from the workbench. It slid them securely into their leather loops.
He picked up his yellow builder hard hat, tapped the brim, and set it firmly upon his head.
“Pack your tool bags, crew,” Frank commanded. His voice carrying the was calm, total power of a general deploying to the front lines. “Load the survey tripods, the torque wrenches, and every spool of copper wire we have on Ironwood Peak. We have a ten-thousand-mile land-wide spark grid to re-pipe.”
Shen Shitou, Jiang Ling’er, and Niu Mang snapped their boots together, saluting all at once:
“Yes, Master!”
In Frank’s eyes, the Heavenly Bug Tracker chimed with an amazing, golden fanfare that echoed through the core of his soul!
Half an hour later, the four of them stood on the wooden pier of the Great Da-Qi Royal River Harbor.
Moored along the docks lay sixty huge royal heavy-transport barges, their decks stacked high with seasoned hardwood timbers, sacks of fiery cement, and massive wooden reels of gleaming copper wire.
Emperor Yan and the Dowager Empress stood at the pier head. She was flanked by three hundred royal guards bearing torches against the midnight chill.
“Master Lu!” Emperor Yan bowed deeply, his eyes burning with desperate hope. “The royal army has placed the entire transport fleet under your supreme command! The fate of the Great Da-Qi Empire rests upon your shoulders!”
“Keep the supply lines open behind us,” Frank said. He stepped onto the gangway of the lead flagship barge. “Make sure the backup shipments of crushed aggregate and grounding rods follow our map points without delay. We’re on a tight project schedule.”
Frank reached the forward watching deck.
Shen Shitou took the helm controls, locking his silver-steel hands onto the steering wheel. Jiang Ling’er took station at the boiler pipe hub, regulating the backup steam pressure. And Niu Mang unrolled the land-wide grid map across the navigation table.
VMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!
The massive repulsor-lift arrays beneath the barge groaned into life, venting plumes of high-pressure white steam into the black river water.
The huge sixty-barge fleet slowly lifted off the water. It rose into the dark night sky with a deep, ringing hum that shook through the river basin.
The vessels turned north, carving through the low clouds at sixty knots, speeding up directly toward the flashing crimson lightning of the world-ending northern frontier.
Frank stood alone at the bow of the lead ship, the icy wind whipping against his denim jacket. His yellow hard hat shone beneath the stars.
Deep within his Dantian, the nine nested rings of the Purple-Gold Diamond Core spun in silent, easy harmony, fueling his body with the infinite, clean power of an immortal stellar reactor.
Frank adjusted his safety glasses, looked toward the burning northern sky. Then he smiled a cold, confident builder’s grin.
“Ten thousand miles of broken fence,” Frank whispered into the wind. “Time to show this world how to pull a proper ground wire.”