The frost didn’t melt as Frank knelt in the straw. It climbed his leather boots in creeping, crystal-clear needles.
Beside him, Shen Shitou stood with his teeth chattering wildly. He grabbed his twenty-pound sledgehammer against his chest like an iron magic charm.
“Master...” Shitou gasped, his breath condensing into clouds of white steam. “This cold... It’s not ordinary mountain frost. It pierces the marrow. It feels like the legendary Yin-Freezing Demon Poison!”
“It isn’t a demon poison,” Frank said. He pulled a six-inch brass probe from his tool belt and wiping it on his apron. “It’s an unvented pressure vessel running past its critical burst threshold. Look at the water drops line along her collarbone.”
Frank leaned closer to the shivering girl.
Her face was semi-clear as polished marble, her delicate eyelashes coated in brittle white rime. Beneath her torn beggar silks, an ornate royal jade pendant lay half-buried in the frost, inscribed with the golden sigil of the Great Da-Qi Dynasty’s royal household: Jiang Ling’er.
Every few seconds, a faint, underground rumble shook beneath her ribs. It sounded like an iron locomotive engine trapped in an airtight underground cellar, shuddering under huge, trapped striking force.
Frank pressed the brass probe against the back of her neck, right above her fourth chest vertebra.
The micro-star-fire spark in his dantian flared with a tiny, barely noticeable hum.
DING.
A crimson-tinted test readout unfolded directly across his vision.
Frank stared at the floating text, his brow furrowing in total, pure outrage.
“Fourteen thousand nine hundred and eighty pounds of pressure,” Frank whispered. His voice shook with the righteous fury of a licensed master checker who had just walked onto a job site where someone had welded a pressure relief valve shut with lead solder.
“Who installed this?” Frank demanded of the empty stable air. “Who authorized this clockwork configuration?! This is a CIE-404 class-one willful fault rule-break! This is criminal manslaughter!”
Shen Shitou blinked, leaning over the frost. “Master... What’s CIE? Is that an ancient Primordial Sect of the First Epoch?”
“It’s the only thing standing between great realm and utter clockwork chaos,” Frank snapped. “Look at this poor girl! She doesn’t have a cold affliction. She has a high-output sun-hot earth-heat fire in her belly! She produces enough raw BTU output to heat a thirty-story town apartment complex!”
Shitou looked at the pale, dying girl, fully confused. “A... Fire? But Master, she’s freezing to death! The hay is turning to nether-ice!”
“Because some complete and utter moron saw high internal pressure and thought, ‘Gee, it looks hot, let’s dump freezing liquid down the chimney!’” Frank gestured wildly with his brass probe. “For eleven years, someone has been force-feeding this kid ice-cold chemical suppressants! They iced over the main exhaust stack! They frosted the bleed valve shut! The cold isn’t coming from inside her—it’s the chemical residue of the garbage pills they’ve been shoving down her throat!”
Frank pointed a finger at the girl’s chest. There, a faint, golden-red pulse flickered beneath three inches of black frost.
“The heat can’t escape,” Frank explained, his tone deadly serious. “The steam has nowhere to vent. It’s locked in an overload phase loop. The pressure is rising by twenty PSI every minute. When it hits fifteen thousand PSI, the internal vessel will suffer total ductile failure. She won’t just die, Shitou. She will detonate with the striking force of five hundred pounds of commercial dynamite. She will turn to steam this stable, that silo, and leave a forty-foot crater in the ground.”
Shen Shitou’s jaw dropped so far it nearly hit his hammer.
He looked at the small, fragile girl curled in the frozen straw. To think that beneath that shivering, pitiful frame lay the destructive power to level half the academy!
And the royal physicians of Great Da-Qi—men revered across the continent as Saint Doctors—had spent eleven years trying to freeze it with pills!
They were pouring water on a greased fire! Shitou thought in total terror. If not for Master Lu’s sky vision, this entire city would have been reduced to ash within a quarter of an hour!
At that moment, the girl’s eyelids fluttered weakly.
Jiang Ling’er looked up through a curtain of ice-crusted black hair.
For eleven years, her life had been a waking nightmare of bone-shattering agony. Her royal father had summoned the finest Grandmasters of the Pill Valley to treat her “Nine-Deep pit Bone-Freezing Rot.” They had forced her to eat Glacial Lotus Roots, Sub-Zero Wyrm Bile, and Thousand-Year Frost Elixirs every sunrise.
Every pill felt like swallowing liquid iron that turned to jagged glass in her veins. With every passing year, the cold grew more choking. Meanwhile, a terrifying, silent pressure built behind her heart, threatening to tear her soul apart.
Three days ago, hearing the court elders whisper that her dantian would “collapse into oblivion” before her sixteenth birthday, she had fled the palace in rags, seeking an anonymous death in the borderlands.
Now, lying in horse manure and freezing straw, she heard this plain-robed young man shouting about “relief valves” and “burst thresholds.”
And then, she felt it.
Frank didn’t wait for her to speak. He extended his right index finger, channeling a tiny, 0.0001% pulse from his Micro-Star-fire Spark directly into her third chest vertebra.
Tssst.
It was a heat hum so pure, so exactly balanced, that it bypassed the frozen rime entirely.
To Ling’er, it didn’t feel like fire. It felt like the warm spring sun breaking through a decade of dark, polar winter.
A tiny gasp tore from her throat.
For the first time in eleven years, the choking, crushing iron band around her chest loosened by half an inch. The roaring, trapped dragon within her dantian seemed to purr in quiet acknowledgment of an elder, sovereign flame!
Ling’er reached out with trembling, frostbitten fingers, weakly clutching Frank’s grey linen sleeve.
“You...” she rasped, her voice shivering like brittle silk. “You see... The fire?”
“I see a fifteen-thousand-pound pressure vessel with a jammed safety valve,” Frank corrected her. He pulled his sleeve back and smoothing the fabric. “And I see an apprentice who desperately needs an emergency clockwork overhaul before she turns this entire zip code into a melted rock waste field.”
Frank reached into his tool pouch, pulled out a second yellow registration slip, and laid it across her shivering knees.
“Name: Jiang Ling’er,” Frank said, pulling a piece of charcoal from behind his ear. “Classroom 404 is hiring a Chief Thermal Venting Checker. Your job description will be regulating our water heater loop, maintaining optimal burning in the winter stove, and boiling water for morning tea. Are you in, or do you want to keep playing human dry-ice bomb in a horse stall?”
Jiang Ling’er stared at the paper.
In the royal palace, she had been a cursed princess, a walking disaster feared by her own brothers and sisters. No sect would take her. No master dared approach her for fear of her nether-frost.
Yet this man looked at her lethal condition and offered her a job tending a tea kettle.
He spoke to her not with fear or pity, but with the annoyed power of a master builder scolding a negligent apprentice!
He isn’t afraid of the dragon flame, Ling’er realized, tears freezing into clear pearls upon her eyelashes. To him, the Primordial Solar Dragon Core that baffled nine royal dynasties is nothing more than... A household stove that needs its damper adjusted!
“Master...” Ling’er whispered, her voice choking with emotion. “Disciple Ling’er... Begs Master to save me!”
She took the charcoal stick with numb, trembling fingers. Then she pressed her thumbprint in dark soot onto line four of the parchment.
“Good,” Frank grunted, blowing the excess soot off the slip and sliding it into his pocket. “First rule of the job site: stop eating frozen weeds. Second rule: when I tell you to vent, you vent. Shen Shitou, give her your blanket.”
“Yes, Master!” Shitou right away shrugged off the dry burlap sack he had draped over his shoulders. He wrapped it gently around the shivering princess.
“Master,” Shitou asked, glancing nervously at Ling’er’s chest where the underground rumble was still shaking. “Should we take her back to the classroom to begin the... Clockwork overhaul?”
“Not yet,” Frank said, glancing at the brass dial of his pocket watch. “It’s one-forty in the afternoon. We need one more signed name before the sunset gong. Or the registration clerk tears up both these contracts and sends all three of us to the quarry.”
Frank turned toward the back exit of the stables.
Before they could take three steps, a tremendous crash shattered the afternoon air.
KRAAA-SHHHH!
The sound of splintering seasoned timber, shattering crystal-clear quartz. The shrill, scared shrieks of several hundred people echoed from the Central Testing Pavilion barely fifty yards away.
A harsh, furious roar boomed across the training grounds:
“Worthless ox! Illiterate peasant trash! You dare shatter the academy’s Five-Hundred-Stone Spirit Quartz Orb with your clumsy brute hands?!”
WHACK! WHACK! WHACK!
The sickening sound of heavy bamboo punishment canes striking human flesh followed right away, with the muffled, agonized grunts of a young man.
“Beat him! Break his kneecaps! Strip the skin off his back until he pays for the spiritual orb!”
Frank stopped in his tracks, his eyes narrowing toward the testing pavilion.
Shen Shitou tightened his grip on his twenty-pound sledgehammer, his jaw setting hard. “Master... That sounds like the exam guards in the Body Tempering Testing Ring.”
“That sounds like someone mishandling heavy digging equipment and blaming the machine,” Frank corrected him, his boots already crunching across the gravel toward the commotion.
“Come on,” Frank muttered, pulling his carpenter’s square from his tool belt. “Let’s go see which unfit builder is breaking their own tools.”