The mountain pass into the Hegemonic Frontier didn’t merely smell of frost. It smelled of office incompetence and unvibrated grout. Cold northern gales howled through dark rock defiles, flinging gray shale against Frank’s flatbed cart.
Frank sat on an upturned fastener crate, calloused hands shoved into the pockets of his grease-stained overalls. A steel tape hung from his left hip, balancing a claw hammer and a scarred multimeter whose needle twitched with ungrounded qi. Beside him, Shen Shitou held the hemp reins with fingers as thick as iron railroad spikes. Behind them, Princess Jiang Ling’er sat atop rough canvas. She wiped down a brass pressure-relief nozzle with an oily rag. Niu Mang lay across two grain sacks, snoring softly with a thistle between his teeth, his trench shovel cradled on his chest.
“Master,” Shitou rumbled, his voice like grinding granite. “The checkpoint gate is obstructed.”
Frank lifted the brim of his canvas cap and squinted through the icy glare. A hundred yards ahead stood a fortified barrier gate that belonged in a museum of load-bearing hazards. Dominating the road was a fifty-foot triumphal archway of black dark rock. Crimson runes snaked across every top door beam, pulsing with a faint hum that set Frank’s teeth on edge. Dozens of iron-armored guards stood in formation, axe-spears bristling.
Before the gate stood a lavish pavilion shielded by velvet windbreaks. Beneath the canopy sat a man draped in the scarlet silk of a 3-Star Master Teacher from the Regional Pavilion. He held a white jade fly-whisk in one hand and steaming snow-dew tea in the other. Beside him stood a border guard post captain whose black iron breastplate shone like a mirror.
“Halt!” Captain Meng bellowed, raising an iron baton. “All unlisted caravans are barred from the Military Zone!”
Shitou pulled the reins. The shaggy oxen halted in the freezing mud. The scarlet-robed scholar rose slowly from his carved chair. He stepped forward, nose wrinkling as he eyed Class 404’s wagon and Frank’s tool belt.
“I’m Master Teacher Envoy Wu, dispatched by the Regional Pavilion,” the scholar announced. “Who’s the master of this pathetic baggage train?”
Frank didn’t stand up. He was staring at the fifty-foot dark rock archway above the gate. A faint chime sounded, with an amber border framing the stone in stress vectors.
Frank squinted up at the span. He pulled a wooden carpenter’s pencil from behind his ear to jot a quick math on his palm. “Look at that top door beam,” Frank muttered. “They didn’t even chamfer the bearing edges. Just stacked thirty tons of raw dark rock on dry-cured silt and called it a royal monument.”
“Insolent vagrant!” Envoy Wu snapped. “You dare speak in riddles before an envoy of the Regional Pavilion?!” He unfurled a heavy bronze scroll with a sharp snap of his wrist. “Under emergency martial provisions, all entering parties must pay the border fee. Fifty thousand spirit stones. Cash, upfront, or your cart and beasts are taken away.”
Captain Meng stepped forward, twenty spear guards leveling weapons at Shitou. “Pay the fee, or we chop your cart into kindling and march your crew into the penal mines.”
Jiang Ling’er’s eyes narrowed, her hand sliding toward the valve of her heat wand. Niu Mang stirred, thick fingers gripping his shovel wooden handle.
“Easy, kids,” Frank said mildly, stepping down from the ox-cart. His heavy work boots sank into the frozen mire. He didn’t look at Envoy Wu, Captain Meng, or the bristling axe-spears. Frank walked past the captain, studying the dark rock archway. “Fifty thousand spirit stones for road upkeep? Did you hire a licensed mason to lay this gate, or did you just find a drunk hedge-wizard with a bucket of river mud and an inflated ego?”
Envoy Wu’s face flushed deep plum. “How dare you! That archway was consecrated by Grand Formation Masters! Bound with thirty-six 3-Star Mountain-Cleaving Magic charms! A single pulse can reduce a Golden Core into bloody vapor!”
“It can’t even reduce a light frost into water,” Frank said, shaking his head. He stepped up to the western pier of the archway. The stone was weeping water drops that formed icicles along mortared seams. “You’ve got four inches of frost-heave on the northern footer. The water table under this canyon is barely three feet down. When the winter froze last week, the ground swelled, lifted your left footing, and passed eighty percent of the crushing dead-load straight into the center keystone.”
Captain Meng frowned, lowering his axe-spear. “What nonsense are you babbling?”
“It’s not nonsense, it’s basic statics,” Frank replied. He unhooked a twelve-inch forged flat pry-bar from his tool belt. “See this wedge right here?” Frank pointed his pry-bar toward a cracked, two-pound sandstone thin wedge wedged between two fifteen-ton granite arch stones. “Some bright spark realized the arch wasn’t plumb. Instead of relaying the footing, they jammed a soft thin wedge into the squeezing ring to make it look straight for the ribbon-cutting.”
Envoy Wu scoffed, raising his chin. “Ignorant tradesman! That’s the Sacred Keystone Stone carving placed by a 3-Star Array Elder! Touch it, and the backlash will turn your bones to ash!”
“It’s a cracked scrap of quarry runoff,” Frank corrected. He glanced back toward his wagon. The cart was parked on a four-degree incline. The left rear iron tire was slowly creeping backward into an eight-inch mud puddle. “Shitou, hold the brake lever for a second. I need a wheel chock.”
“Understood, Master,” Shitou grunted, holding the ten-ton wagon immobile with one forearm.
Frank jammed the thin tip of his pry-bar into the hairline fracture beneath the sandstone wedge. He tapped the butt of the pry-bar once with the flat face of his claw hammer.
Tink.
The sound was sharp, small, and fully empty of spiritual aura. Envoy Wu opened his mouth to order his guards to strike. Then, a high-pitched, crystal-clear ping echoed from the top of the fifty-foot arch. The thirty-six Mountain-Cleaving Magic charms flickered from red to a sickly yellow.
“What’s that sound?” Captain Meng whispered, hand trembling on his sword handle.
Frank gave the pry-bar a gentle two-inch downward pry. The two-pound sandstone wedge popped out of the seam, tumbling neatly into Frank’s waiting hand. “Got it,” Frank said, nodding in satisfaction.
He turned his back on the archway, walking casually back toward the ox-cart. Behind him, reality unraveled along load-bearing shear lines. Without the friction thin wedge holding the uneven load, the fifteen-ton dark rock arch stones shifted by a fraction of a tiny fraction of an inch. That fraction of a tiny fraction of an inch was four hundred thousand pounds of crushing force suddenly finding no opposing vector. The 3-Star Mountain-Cleaving Barrier didn’t detonate with sky flame. Instead, the runic circuit experienced instant phase collapse.
CRRRRRK-CRACK!
A web of blinding white micro-fractures raced through every block of the old family archway. The dark rock blocks ground against one another with the screech of an iron ship running aground on a granite reef. Then, under the perfect laws of gravity and load-bearing failure, the entire fifty-foot arch collapsed inward upon itself. The stone shattered along natural cleavage planes. Because of that, it cascaded downward like a black waterfall, pulverizing into a spotless mound of three-quarter-inch crushed aggregate gravel.
The dust cloud puffed out in a gentle circle, coating Envoy Wu’s boots in fine gray powder. When the dust cleared, the impassable choke-point was gone. In its place lay an eighty-foot stretch of fresh, packed crushed stone that filled every freezing mud-puddle and rut in the road.
Envoy Wu’s teacup slipped from his limp fingers, shattering on the flat stone slabs. His white jade fly-whisk tumbled into the dirt. His knees gave out entirely, dropping him onto his stool like an empty sack of grain. Captain Meng’s axe-spear fell from his numbed hands, clattering against his iron shin guards.
“The... The Ancestral Gate...” Meng choked out, eyes bulging in terror. “A 3-Star Mountain-Cleaving Array... Dissolved?”
“He didn’t just dissolve it,” Envoy Wu whimpered, his face pale as a shroud. “He struck the invisible flaw in Heaven’s foundation! The Heavenly Step of Spatial Dissolution! With a tap of an iron claw, he turned a sky defensive formation into road-bedding!”
The twenty spear guards stumbled backward, lowering their pikes as the dust settled over their shin guards.
“An Ancient Grand Saint!” one guard stammered, pale under his helmet. “He shattered the gate without a trace of qi!”
Frank walked around to the back of his cart, crouched down. Then he kicked the two-pound sandstone wedge firmly beneath the left rear wheel. “There,” Frank grumbled, wiping his hands on his canvas trousers. “Now the cart won’t roll. You see what I mean about unpermitted stonework? If you don’t anchor footings below the frost line, the whole thing comes down when someone touches the trim.”
He picked up a handful of the freshly crushed dark rock from the roadbed, rolled the small stones between his thumb and forefinger, and frowned. “Grade C crushed stone. Too much silt content. But it’ll do for a sub-base. Shitou, pull the cart forward twenty feet. Let’s compact this gravel while it’s still damp.”
“Yes, Master,” Shitou said solemnly, clucking to the oxen.
The cart rolled forward with a smooth, satisfying crunch across the newly paved highway. Frank climbed back up to his fastener crate, picked up his tea thermos, and unscrewed the lid. The wagon rolled past the trembling form of Envoy Wu. Then, a sharp cry echoed from the clouds above. A silver messenger falcon plummeted through the canyon draft. It dropped a heavy wooden scroll tube wrapped in gold cord onto Frank’s lap.
Frank caught the metal tube, popped the wax seal with his thumb, and unrolled the stiff parchment.
Frank looked at the document, then looked toward the distant dark shape of the frontier castle city rising against the horizon.
“Unlisted array practitioners?” Frank scoffed, tucking the scroll into his tool roll. “I’m not an array fighter. I’m a general builder. But if their building department is running this whole valley, I’m going to need a commercial trade license just to buy wholesale copper wire.”
He took a sip of lukewarm tea and looked down at Envoy Wu, who was still wheezing in the gravel.
“Hey, Envoy,” Frank called down mildly. “Tell your city inspectors that whoever poured the tollgate footing owes the public works department a fifty-thousand stone refund. The work was fully out of spec.”
With a flick of Shitou’s whip, the ox-cart crested the gravel rise. It rolled steadily toward the iron gates of the Hegemonic frontier.