The aroma of simmered star-anise, roasted beef bones, and fresh scallions drifted through the narrow, cobbled alleys behind the capital’s central trade district.
Frank leaned his forearms against the low wooden railing of a third-floor tea balcony. He took a massive, steaming bite of a freshly made scallion beef bun.
Beside him at the weathered pine table, his students were thoroughly engrossed in their own culinary conquest.
Shen Shitou had already polished off three giant bowls of hand-pulled noodles, his chopsticks moving with the rhythmic care of an air-powered nail gun.
Niu Mang was happily chewing through a plate of braised pork belly, his eyes closed in agrarian bliss.
Princess Jiang Ling’er sipped her jasmine tea with delicate poise, her clockwork ledger propped open beside her fine china bowl as she recorded the wholesale timber prices she had gathered from passing merchants.
Frank chewed thoughtfully, glancing down into the shaded stone alleyway below the balcony.
Directly across the alley stood the rear service gate of the Grand Formation Masters Guild. A massive, vaulted archway of carved black glass heavy with glowing blue runic channels.
Standing beneath the archway were three young men dressed in clean, sapphire-blue robes stitched with silver star wheels.
They were 1-Star Formation Apprentices, their noses tilted high in the air, streaming the haughty, intellectual arrogance common to fighters who dealt in sacred sharp-angled runes rather than crude physical labor.
And lying in the muddy gutter at their feet was a ragged, trembling boy.
The boy couldn’t have been older than sixteen.
He wore a patched, threadbare hemp tunic that was far too large for his starved frame, soaked through with muddy alley water.
Across his eyes was tied a frayed, grease-stained strip of coarse linen.
He was fully blind.
Clutched tightly in his thin, dirt-caked fingers were two slender, eighteen-inch rods of polished spring-steel. Simple metal rods with bent handles. It looked remarkably like sound tuning forks or amateur water dowsing rods.
“Blind beggar!” the lead apprentice spat, kicking the boy’s wooden rice bowl into the wall with a sharp clack. “How many times must we warn you to clear this alleyway? You dare bring your filthy beggar’s presence to the sacred gates of the Formation Guild?!”
The blind boy scrambled forward on his hands and knees, wildly searching through the mud until his fingers found his two steel rods.
He pulled them to his chest. His thin lips shook. But his milky, sightless eyes behind the cloth turned stubbornly toward the black glass archway.
“I... I’m not begging!” the youth’s voice cracked with raw, desperate passion. “I’m telling you the truth! The Three-Star Grand Leyline Array protecting your inner vault is out of balance! The third underground node is drifting!”
The three apprentices exchanged incredulous glances, then burst into mocking, arrogant laughter.
“Listen to the blind dog!” a second apprentice sneered, crossing his arms. “He claims our 3-Star Grand Array—designed by Grandmaster Gu himself, sealed with forty-nine jade formation flags—has a defect!”
“A blind cripple lecturing approved masters on deep ringing hum!” the third apprentice laughed, drawing a short bamboo cane from his sleeve. “You sit in the dirt and tap two pieces of scrap iron against the stone floor. You think you understand the sky calculus of the stars?!”
“It’s not sky calculus!” the blind boy shouted, tears cutting through the grime on his hollow cheeks as he struck the two steel rods against the curb.
Ting—
A high-pitched, metal chime rang through the stone alley.
The boy pressed the base of the rods against the damp flat stone slabs. His ear was pressed flat against the cold stone. He listened with wild, painful focus.
“The hum is wrong!” the boy pleaded, his voice breaking. “It’s a fifty-cycle ringing hum! It’s shaking beneath the foundation! The northern leyline is carrying twenty percent more astral charge than the southern channel! If you don’t isolate the ground loop, the phase imbalance will blow the central matrix apart when the autumn thunder storms arrive!”
The lead apprentice’s face darkened with ugly irritation.
“Enough of your lunacy!” the apprentice barked, raising his leather boot to stomp on the boy’s fingers. “Break his scrap iron rods and throw him into the river! Let’s see if he hears fifty cycles of water down his throat!”
Up on the tea balcony, Frank stopped chewing.
His chopsticks hovered half an inch above his bamboo plate.
He slowly leaned his head over the wooden railing. He stared down at the blind boy with an expression of intense, unexpected skilled shock.
Frank’s system screen flickered in his left eye, pulsing with vibrant amber test runes:
Frank lowered his bun.
He looked at the two steel rods in the boy’s hands.
He looked at the boy’s head pressed flat against the curb.
He listened to the deep, almost barely noticeable low-hum shaking humming through the solid mountain stone of the capital city.
To any fighter in the Jiuzhou Plane, what the boy had just said sounded like the nonsensical ravings of a sun-baked lunatic.
“Fifty cycles.” “Ground loop.” “Phase imbalance.”
None of those words existed in the traditional scripture of the Thirty-Six Heavenly Formation Manuals.
To fighters, arrays were governed by “Elemental Hexagrams,” “Sky Dragon Veins,” and “Yin-Yang Flow-charge.”
To Frank, however, the boy’s terminology was instantly, horrifyingly familiar.
“Line flow pushback...” Frank murmured under his breath, his eyes narrowing with deep respect. “A fifty-hertz ground loop hum... And a phase imbalance between the hot and neutral legs of an unshielded three-phase high-voltage transformer.”
He looked down at the boy in the mud.
The kid didn’t have an oscilloscope.
He didn’t have a digital multimeter.
He didn’t have a spectrum analyzer or an approved ground-fault tester.
He had two pieces of bent scrap steel and a set of ears so freakishly sensitive that he was literally measuring the spark cycle hum of the land-wide leyline grid with his bare skull.
Down in the alley, the lead apprentice’s heavy leather boot was dropping toward the blind boy’s fingers.
THWIP.
Before the boot could touch the stone, an object the size of a fist shot down from the third-floor balcony with pinpoint wind-cutting accuracy.
THWACK!
The flying object struck the lead apprentice squarely in the center of his forehead with the striking force of a fastball!
“OOF!”
The apprentice staggered backward, his hands flying to his face, his vision swimming with spinning white stars. He collapsed onto his rear in the mud.
A warm, pillowy object dropped harmlessly into his lap.
It was a huge, steaming, glistening scallion pork bun, its white dough slightly squished by the impact, smelling delightfully of ginger and roasted pork.
“Who?!” the fallen apprentice shrieked, clutching his bruised forehead. “Who dared to strike an approved Formation Apprentice with... With steamed dim sum?!”
On the third-floor balcony, Frank leaned casually over the railing, his elbows resting comfortably on the lacquered wood. He looked down into the alleyway with a deadpan stare.
“Hey, blue-robes,” Frank said, his voice flat and calm. “Leave the kid alone.”
The apprentices looked up, their eyes flashing with fury. They saw a young man in a faded cotton flannel shirt and denim overalls leaning over the railing.
“Insolent mortal peasant!” the second apprentice snarled, pointing an accusing finger upward. “You dare assault a student of the Grand Formation Guild?! We’re royal scholars! We manipulate the sacred arrays of the heavens!”
Frank didn’t even blink.
“You’re three apprentices who don’t know the difference between a grounded neutral and a floating chassis,” Frank replied dryly. “The kid told you your ground loop is out of phase by twenty percent, and instead of pulling out a test probe, you tried to break his tools with a boot. That makes you bad technicians and even worse workers. Scram before I throw a bowl of hot chili noodles at your ears.”
The apprentices turned red with humiliation.
They opened their mouths to summon their formation magic charms. But then their eyes caught sight of the person standing right behind Frank.
Shen Shitou stepped forward to the balcony edge, his five-foot iron sledgehammer resting against the railing, his massive, boulder-like chest bare beneath his leather apron, his glare cold and unbending as solid mountain stone.
Beside him, Princess Jiang Ling’er stepped into the light, her refined noble presence streaming an aura of supreme royal power that made the apprentices’ knees shake.
The apprentices swallowed their words, their arrogance vanishing in an instant.
“You... You just wait!” the lead apprentice stammered, scrambling to his feet while clutching his bruised forehead. “When Grandmaster Gu activates the Grand Array tomorrow, we shall report this outrage to the city judges!”
The three apprentices turned and scurried through the rear service gate. It slammed the heavy black glass doors shut behind them.
Down in the muddy alley, the blind youth slowly sat up, his thin chest heaving with ragged breaths.
He reached out his trembling hands, expecting another blow, another curse, or another boot to the ribs.
Instead, a soft plop landed in the mud directly beside his knees.
It was a clean, white paper napkin wrapping a fresh, piping-hot steamed pork bun, still streaming savory warmth.
And resting on top of the napkin was a torn scrap of coarse builder drafting paper.
On the paper, drawn in clean, dark graphite pencil, were three crisp exact diagrams:
A standard delta-wye transformer grounding blueprint.
An RC low-pass filter math for a fifty-hertz ringing hum.
And a simple, elegant sharp-angled formula for calculating phase flow pushback across an unbalanced three-phase underground guide-rod.
The blind boy froze.
He couldn’t see the paper with his eyes.
Yet, as his calloused, dirt-stained fingertips brushed across the graphite grooves pressed deep into the heavy parchment. His entire stance was locked rigid.
His fingers traced the lines.
He felt the care of the angles. He felt the balance of the ratios.
He felt the three exact formulas that solved the painful puzzle that had tormented his sleepless nights for five long years.
The blind youth slowly lifted his head toward the third-floor balcony, his milky, sightless eyes wide and trembling behind the frayed linen bandage.
“Who... Who are you?” the boy whispered, his voice cracking with stunned awe.
Frank stood on the balcony. He wiped his hands on a clean napkin. He looked down at the scrawny, gifted kid in the gutter with a faint, knowing smirk.
“Fix your ground loop first, kid,” Frank called down softly. “You’ve got a floating neutral under the foundation. Isolate the ground wire, run a copper bypass rod six feet into the earth. The hum will go away.”
He turned his back on the railing, tossing his empty plate onto the table.
“And when you’re tired of playing with scrap iron in the mud,” Frank added over his shoulder, “come visit Ironwood Peak. We’ve got real test equipment, approved copper wiring, and three hot meals a day.”
Frank adjusted his leather tool belt, checked the time on his pocket watch, and nodded to his students.
“Come on, guys,” Frank said, heading toward the stairs. “Lunch break is over. Let’s head back to the Master Teacher Pavilion and finally collect that stamped badge.”