The three hundred master teachers and visiting elders of the 1-Star Pavilion struggled to their feet, their eyes shining with respectful, joyous celebration.
The crushing fifty-gravity collapse had lifted.
The air had returned to their lungs.
And sitting before them on the shattered green jade dais was a young mortal who had achieved what three thousand years of approved scholarship had deemed an impossible fantasy.
Grand Elder Yan raised his hands, preparing to lead the assembly in the sacred Chant of Hundredfold Thanks:
“Praise be to Senior Master Lu! Praise be to the Sage of the Common People, who has showed up the Emperor-Grade Foundation Vessel—”
WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH!
Yan’s words were wildly cut short by a blistering, fire-like blast of white-hot air that exploded outward from the central dais!
The heat inside the Grand Hall spiked by eighty degrees Fahrenheit in less than half a second.
The hem of Grand Elder Yan’s silver ritual robe burst into tiny orange flames. That forced the ancient elder to slap his robes wildly with his sleeves.
“Merciful Ancestors!” an elder in the front row shrieked, stumbling backward as the hair on his forearms instantly curled and singed to black ash. “What’s this heat?! Is the demon dragon attacking again?!”
The scorching heat wave swelled across the three-hundred-foot hall with the relentless fury of an opened blast fire door.
Along the outer edge walls, ancient hand-painted scrolls depicting thirty ages of Founding Grandmasters began to curl, their dried rice paper yellowing and smoking before bursting into spontaneous flames!
Fwump! Fwump! Fwump!
Hundreds of tall ritual beeswax candles standing in gold-trimmed bronze floor candelabras simply slumped over, their solid wax melted in seconds into bubbling puddles of hot grease that sizzled across the marble floor.
The silk sashes of twelve senior exam guards began to smolder, emitting the sharp, acrid stench of singed horsehair and scorched embroidery.
“The Divine Smelting of the Sacred Altar!” Grand Elder Yan proclaimed, his eyes shining with tears that evaporated the instant they touched his flushed cheeks. “In the lost scrolls of the Heavenly Sovereigns, it’s recorded that an Emperor-Grade Foundation Vessel can’t tolerate the profane dust of the mortal plane! It must consecrate the ground upon which it rests with the unquenchable radiance of the Solar Heavens!”
“Such boundless, terrifying purity!” an ancient mentor cried out, dropping his charred fan and prostrating upon the burning tiles. “He burns away our sins! He purges the dirt of the Pavilion! Praise be to the Solar Monarch of the Northern Ridge!”
Down on the dais, Frank opened his eyes, wincing against the blinding, glowing-red warnings flashing across his vision.
He wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead with the back of his flannel sleeve.
The system display inside his eye was practically screaming:
Frank stared at the numbers, his eyebrows twitching in mounting skilled disgust.
“Forty-five thousand BTU per second,” Frank muttered under his breath. He felt the rubber soles of his steel-toed work boots softening like warm licorice beneath his weight. “That’s nearly fifty thousand kilowatts of nonstop heat rejection. That’s enough heat to power a commercial steel rolling mill or heat an entire Chicago suburb in January.”
He looked down at his feet.
“Whoops,” Frank grunted. “My cooling fans are venting straight into the basement floorboards.”
Frank’s physical body lacked living radiator fins. Because of that, cooling water jackets, or an external evaporative cooling tower, the Heavenly Bug Tracker’s self-running QA safety stonework had done what any sane heavy-duty spark engineer would do in an emergency:
It grounded the circuit.
It diverted the sky-high heat exhaust down through the dense bone structure of his legs, through the thick rubber soles of his boots. Then it dumped the entire forty-five-thousand-BTU heat load directly into the nearest physical mass: the load-bearing solid mountain stone of the pavilion foundation.
The physical consequences were immediate, terrifying, and visually world-ending.
SZZZZZZZZT—!
The green spirit jade dais beneath Frank’s boots ceased to be green.
The stone turned a dull, angry cherry-red.
Within three breaths, the cherry-red hue intensified into blinding, blazing bright orange.
Then, with a sound like a slab of butter dropped into a screaming cast-iron skillet, the three-foot-thick block of solid spirit jade turned semi-clear, liquid, and molten white!
Gurgle-pop.
Bubbles of boiling, melted jade burst beneath the heels of Frank’s boots. He splashed tiny droplets of glowing white melted rock waste across the surrounding floor.
The marble flat stone slabs bordering the dais began to crack and spall wildly, their moisture flash-boiling inside the stone matrix, blowing tiny shrapnel fragments ten feet into the air!
The three hundred master teachers fell over one another in a wild, screaming stampede to reach the outer edge walls.
“THE TRUE SAMADHI FIRE!” Chief Judge Wu wailed, covering his eyes with his scorched sleeves. “THE Ancient Starry RADIANCE OF THE NINE HEAVENS!”
“HE IS BURNING AWAY MORTAL Dirt!” Grand Elder Yan shouted in thrilled terror, his face lit up by the blinding white glare of the melting dais. “IN THE SACRED CANONS OF THE FOUNDING EMPERORS, WHEN A DIVINE VESSEL IS FORGED, THE Starry FIRE MUST PURGE THE Underground VOID OF ALL DROSS!”
“LOOK AT HIS POISE!” another elder shouted from the back wall, sweating through his robes. “HE SITS UPON LIQUID WHITE JADE WITH COMPLETE CALM! HIS FLESH IS UNTOUCHED BY Starry FLAME!”
To the fighters, Frank’s relaxed, unmoving stance was the pinnacle of divine martial invulnerability.
To Frank, he was simply stuck.
“If I stand up right now,” Frank reasoned mentally, feeling the squishy, half-melted rubber beneath his heels, “I’m going to leave the soles of my favorite boots glued to forty tons of liquid glass. Red Wings are expensive in this economy. I have to wait for the heat surge to taper off.”
In the visitor gallery above, Princess Jiang Ling’er leaned over the railing. Her face was flushed from the rising heat draft.
Her fingers were flying across her parchment ledger, performing furious heat-powered heat-transfer counts.
“Specific heat capacity of granite: zero point seven nine Blasts of heat per gram-Degrees of star-heat,” Ling’er recited under her breath, her eyes darting between Frank’s heels and the floor. “Thickness: two point seven grams per cubic half-inch. Current-carrying heat diffusivity across crystal-clear bedrock: one point two square tiny fractions of an inch per second!”
Shen Shitou shielded his eyes with his forearm, leaning against his iron sledgehammer. “What does that mean, Princess? Is Master going to burn through the floor?”
“He has already burned through the floor, Shitou!” Ling’er replied, her voice filled with rising alarm. “The heat energy isn’t draining away laterally into the air! It’s dropping vertically along the gravity slope! The heat flux is conducting straight down into the main underground strata!”
Niu Mang peeked through the railing, wiping sweat from his brow. “Down into the strata? Ain’t that where the city’s spring wells come from? My uncle said the capital sits right on top of the Nine-Yin Cold River!”
Ling’er’s hand froze mid-stroke, her ink brush hovering over the page.
Her fine china face drained of all color.
“The Nine-Yin Cold River...” Ling’er whispered, her voice trembling in sudden, horrifying understanding. “An underground karst underground water bed... Enclosed in a high-pressure limestone cave two hundred feet beneath the city foundation!”
Down on the dais, Frank felt the floorboards beneath him give a deep, hollow shudder.
It wasn’t the shaking of a cracking tile.
It was the deep, rhythmic, underground throbbing of an underground boiler whose water jacket was suddenly subjected to forty-five thousand BTU per second of direct, unthrottled current-carrying heat.
Two hundred feet beneath the marble floor of the Master Teacher Pavilion, the ancient, crystal-clear waters of the capital’s deepest underground water bed were meeting the heat exhaust of a white dwarf star.
The water at the top of the underground cave didn’t warm up gradually.
It didn’t simmer.
It hit overload flash point in less than five seconds!
HISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS—!
An underground sound—muffled, giant, and echoing like the scream of a trapped giant beast—rumbled through the bedrock beneath the capital city of Tianxuan.
Frank looked down at the glowing white crater beneath his boots.
He looked at the steam beginning to hiss up through the hairline cracks in the marble floor eighty feet away.
Frank swallowed hard, slowly pulling his hands from his pockets.
Inside his mind, Frank was wildly navigating through the Heavenly Bug Tracker’s heat regulation submenus.
“Can I throttle the core down to idle?” Frank asked mentally, tapping a series of floating blue sliders.
“Terrific,” Frank muttered, wiping sweat that right away evaporated off his eyebrows. “If I throttle down, I become a heavy local gravity black hole and swallow the prefecture. If I don’t throttle down, I act as an unshielded earth-heat drill. Who designed this progression curve? Did nobody run a heat test model before pushing this build to production?”
High in the eastern gallery, Princess Jiang Ling’er was tapping her copper pressure gauge against the dark wood railing, her dark eyes darting across the room.
“Shitou! Mang! Prepare for high-pressure shifted weight!” Ling’er ordered, her high-born voice carrying sharp clockwork urgency. “When water is heated past its critical point under confined deep-rock pressure, its volume expands by a factor of one thousand six hundred! If that underground karst underground water bed has no sky relief valve, the deep water pressure will exceed the shear modulus of the overlying granite caprock!”
Shen Shitou tightened his grip on his five-foot iron sledgehammer, his massive shoulders tensing. “You mean the street is gonna pop, Princess?”
“The street isn’t going to pop, Shitou,” Ling’er stated with icy care. “The street is going to launch into the clouds like the lid of an unvented tea kettle!”
Across the grand hall, the marble floorboards groaned like the timbers of a sinking galleon.
A low, deep-throated shaking thrummed through the soles of every fighter’s boots, shaking their teeth and making their tea cups dance across the shattered tables.
Grand Elder Yan clutched his scepter, his knuckles white. He stared down at the glowing white floor in numbed dread.
“The Earth Dragon has turned in its sleep...” Yan whispered in holy terror. “The foundational roots of Tianxuan Capital are resonating with the birth of a God!”
“Uh oh,” Frank muttered. “The basement has a water leak. And the boiler just lost its pressure control valve.”