The air above the northern castle walls didn’t merely smell of ozone. It smelled of impending heavy-duty manslaughter. A hundred and twenty feet above the castle courtyard, the “Sun-Severing Sky-Spike” was tearing reality apart with jagged claws of violent purple electricity.
The bright light was a massive spire of forged meteor-iron and sky jade, designed during the founding of the empire to serve as the main defensive anchor for the five-hundred-mile frontier barrier. Under normal operations, it was meant to project a calm golden bright light that repelled the dark night-hunting beasts of the northern wasteland. Now, it looked like an exploding power transformer at an uninspected chemical plant.
Violent purple lightning arcs, thick as ancient pine trunks, whipped through the freezing mountain gale. Every three seconds, a stray arc jumped fifty feet from the spire’s discharge ring. He struck an armored watchtower with an ear-splitting crack. Stone low roof walls exploded into glowing shrapnel. Two siege giant crossbows were boiled away down to their bronze axle pins. Their twisted metal frames burned with greenish-white fire. Even worse, the arcing current was crawling down the damp outside stonework like an army of electric spiders, creeping inexorably toward the guard post’s underground spirit-stone magazine and black powder vault.
Down on the lower walkways, chaos reigned supreme. Three 4-Star military formation elders, their stitched sky robes singed and smoking, were scrambling down the winding spiral stairs in blind panic.
“Heavenly wrath!” the lead elder shrieked, tripping over his hem and rolling down five stone steps. “The Ancestral Leylines have cursed the frontier! The Sky-Spike is possessed by a Ninth-Heaven Thunder Fiend! Flee! Clear the castle wall before the magazine detonates!”
General Zhao stood at the base of the tower stairs, drawing his broadsword and roaring into the screaming wind. “Hold your posts! If the bright light fails, the dark beast hordes will overrun the northern trenches within an hour! Clear the ammunition vaults! Move the powder kegs!”
Soldiers scattered like ants before a boot heel, coughing in the thick sulfur fumes. Frank walked into the command courtyard, his hands resting on his hips as he looked up through the blinding violet flashes. Behind him, Shitou carried a sixty-pound spool of braided two-ought copper cable. Meanwhile, Niu Mang held an eight-foot solid steel iron stake with an iron driving cap. Jiang Ling’er carried a heavy brass C-clamp. Xiao Yu walked behind them with his steel tuning forks held to his ears.
Frank squinted at the arcing iron spire. A neon-cyan test display flared in his vision. It wrapped the malfunctioning bright light in sharp blueprint lines.
Frank shook his head in total disgust. “Look at that grounding scheme,” Frank muttered over the howling wind. “They bonded the main lightning downconductor to a dry granite flat stone slab. Granite has a spark pushback of over eight thousand ohms! It’s like trying to drain a swimming pool through a plastic drinking straw.”
General Zhao spotted Frank through the smoke, rushing over with desperate fury in his bloodshot eyes. “Master Lu!” Zhao shouted. “The formation elders have abandoned the tower! The spire has gathered one hundred and twenty thousand volts of wild lightning! Can your tradesmen seal the formation before it blows the ammunition magazine?!”
“It’s not wild lightning, General,” Frank shouted back mildly. “It’s a floating neutral. Your spire is pooling static charge from the northern storm clouds, and because the ground path has eight thousand ohms of pushback, the voltage has to arc across the air to find a return path to the water table.”
Frank unhooked his four-inch forged grounding clamp from his tool belt. “Don’t evacuate the powder magazine. That’s wasted labor. Shitou, grab the cable spool. Niu Mang, take the eight-foot spike to the drainage ditch behind the east wall. Ling’er, watch the flashover boundary.”
“Yes, Master!” the students shouted all at once.
Frank didn’t wait for permission. He grabbed the heavy brass grounding clamp, took the leading end of the two-ought braided copper cable. Then he began jogging up the spiral stone stairs of the lightning tower. The air grew hotter with every flight of stairs. Arcs of violet electricity snapped along the iron handrails, stinging the soles of Frank’s boots through the granite steps.
“Xiao Yu!” Frank bellowed down the stairwell. “Give me the standing wave hum!”
Fifty feet below, the blind boy stood in the courtyard amid swirling sparks. He struck his steel tuning forks against his belt buckle. “Eight hundred and eighty Hertz, Master!” Xiao Yu’s voice echoed up the stone shaft, sharp and clear. “The phase angle is drifting forty degrees clockwise! The crest of the wave hits every two point four seconds!”
“Got it!” Frank yelled.
He burst out onto the open-air watching platform at the top of the tower. The gale screamed across the low roof wall like a wounded dragon. Above him, the sixty-foot meteor-iron spire was glowing blinding violet. It was surrounded by a swirling halo of ungrounded star-fire that crackled with the sound of tearing canvas. A massive arc of purple lightning leapt from the spire’s collar. It struck the stone floor barely three feet from Frank’s boots, blowing a six-inch crater in the stonework.
Frank didn’t flinch. He checked his pocket watch, counting the rhythm of the pulses.
One... Two...
The instant the standing wave reached its null point at two point four seconds, Frank lunged forward. He slapped the heavy brass grounding clamp directly onto the unpainted meteor-iron discharge ring at the base of the spire. He tightened the threaded steel T-handle with blistering speed.
Crank. Crank. Tight.
“Chassis clamped!” Frank roared over the wind. He leaned over the low roof wall, hoisting the heavy spool of braided copper cable. Then he hurled it into the open air!
The thick copper braid uncoiled like a striking bronze serpent. It plunged eighty feet down the sheer upright face of the castle wall into the muddy ravine below.
“Niu Mang! Drive the spike!” Frank bellowed.
Down in the dark ravine, Niu Mang stood in the ankle-deep mud of the drainage runoff ditch. With one mighty sweep of his hard dark metal trench shovel, he scraped away four feet of dry topsoil. He exposed the slick, wet black shale of the underground groundwater underground water bed. Shen Shitou stepped forward, placing the eight-foot copper-plated steel grounding rod vertically against the wet shale.
Shitou raised his twenty-pound sledgehammer with both hands, his newly formed 9-Pattern Golden Core blazing like an internal sun.
BOOM!
A single titanic hammer strike drove the eight-foot steel rod flush into the wet bedrock. It anchored it deep into the water-bearing strata! Niu Mang grabbed the falling copper cable end, shoved it into the heavy clockwork split-bolt lug on the spike’s head. Then he wrenched the nut tight with an iron crescent wrench.
CLICK.
The circuit was completed. Pushback to earth: zero point eight ohms.
What happened next defied ten thousand years of traditional doctrine. To the scared soldiers and formation elders watching from the courtyards, the heavens seemed to pause. The terrifying, chaotic purple lightning that had been tearing the watchtowers to shreds didn’t explode. Instead, the instant the circuit connected to the low-pushback groundwater table, the laws of electromagnetism asserted total dominion over the chaotic spiritual energy.
SHZZZZZZZZZZZZT!
The jagged violet arcs were wildly yanked out of the sky! Like a rushing river finding an open spillway, thousands of current units of clear star-fire were sucked straight down the braided copper channel, racing down the outside wall in a blinding streak of orange light and diving eight feet into the wet shale below!
FZZZZZZZZZT... HUMMMMM.
A massive underground shaking pulsed through the bedrock of the entire mountain range. The dangerous purple flashover vanished fully. In its place, the meteor-iron spire ceased its uneven arcing. The spiritual current, now flowing through a balanced, perfectly grounded circuit, steadied into a spotless, clear standing wave.
A amazing pillar of warm, pure golden light erupted from the tip of the Sky-Spike, piercing the storm clouds and shooting ten miles into the upper air! The brilliant golden light cascaded outward in a sweeping, five-hundred-mile dome of total defensive perfection, lighting up the dark northern tundra with the calm, exactly flawless clarity of unending dawn!
The painful shriek of tearing metal died away, replaced by the deep, soothing, sixty-cycle hum of a heavy-duty transformer running at peak smooth speed.
On the high watching platform, Frank straightened his back, wiped a streak of soot from his cheek with the back of his canvas glove. Then he pulled an eight-inch crescent wrench from his pocket. He reached up, tapped the brass grounding clamp once to test the torque, and nodded. “Solid earth ground. Sub-one ohm flow pushback. That’ll hold through the winter.”
Down in the courtyard, total silence reigned. The three 4-Star formation elders sat frozen on the spiral stairs, their mouths gaping open. They stared up at the amazing golden pillar that had just saved the castle. General Zhao stared at the glowing bright light, then at the simple copper cable running down the stonework wall into the mud. The broadsword in his hand slowly dropped, its tip resting against the flat stone slabs.
“He subdued a four-star military disaster,” Zhao whispered, his voice trembling with sheer awe. “With a piece of scrap wire and an iron tent stake?!”
Ten thousand guard post soldiers along the castle walls lowered their shields. Then, a roar of triumph erupted from the castle walls:
“Master Lu!” “The Saint of the Golden Bright light!”
General Zhao turned toward the base of the tower stairs. Frank strolled down the spiral steps. Then, his tool roll under his arm and his yellow tape measure swinging at his hip, General Zhao stood at attention on the wet flat stone slabs. Zhao sheathed his sword, clasped his iron gauntlets together. Then it bowed with the solemn respect of a veteran commander.
“Master Lu,” General Zhao proclaimed, his voice carrying across the command square. “By the supreme martial power of the Hegemonic Northern Frontier, you have saved this guard post from total ruin. This castle is forever in your debt.”
Frank gave a dry shrug, looking at the general. “Look, General, it was just a missing ground wire. You really need to hire a licensed electrician. You don’t have a single surge arrestor on that whole deck.”
Before General Zhao could reply, a violent, ear-splitting sonic boom tore through the upper air above the castle.
CRACK-BOOOOOOOOM!
The clouds parted wildly as a purple lightning-chariot pulled by four sky dragon-horses dropped from the storm sky, with an arrogant roar that echoed off the mountain peaks:
“WHO DARED GROUND MY CLAN’S ANCESTRAL LIGHTNING?!”