The ancient Southern District of Tianxuan Capital was famous across the kingdom for its calm tea gardens, fragrant apothecary shops, and crystal-clear public bathhouses.
For five hundred years, the citizens of the capital had drawn their water from sixty-four deep stone wells connected to the legendary Nine-Yin Cold River.
The river was an underground marvel. An underground karst underground water bed flowing two hundred feet beneath the city’s limestone bedrock, always chilled to near-freezing heat levels by underground ice-slow veins.
At the Dragon-Spring Tea Pavilion, two blocks south of the Master Teacher Pavilion, Old Master Lin was preparing to brew a pot of premium Pre-Rain Dragon Well tea.
He lowered his polished copper bucket into the deep stone well in the courtyard. That let the hemp rope hum smoothly over the wooden pulley.
Splash.
The bucket hit the surface of the underground water, sinking deep into the dark depths.
Old Master Lin gripped the wooden crank handle and began winding the rope back up.
“Best water in the province,” Lin boasted proudly to the gathered tea scholars sitting under the wisteria arbor. “Drawn from forty deep-water lengths beneath the earth! Pure, stone-rich, and ice-cold as winter frost!”
The copper bucket breached the mouth of the well.
Old Master Lin reached out his hand to unhook the bale.
The moment his fingers touched the copper rim, his eyes bugged out of his head.
“OWWWWW!”
Lin shrieked, snatching his hand back as a blister instantly formed across his palm!
The polished copper bucket was not cold.
It was scorching hot.
Inside the bucket, the water was not clear and still.
It was bubbling wildly, churning in a rolling, frothing boil that sounded like an angry soup pot over an open campfire!
Glug-glug!
Dense, white plumes of scalding steam billowed from the water’s surface. He smelled faintly of boiled sulfur, dissolved limestone, and stone salt.
“The water...” one of the tea scholars stammered, spilling his empty cup. “The water is boiling inside the well?!”
Before Old Master Lin could reply, the ground beneath their feet gave a sharp, violent shudder.
THUMP.
A bone-shaking shock struck the underside of the courtyard flat stone slabs from below like a dropped battering ram.
From the dark, yawning shaft of the stone well came a low, terrifying moan.
HISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS—!
Down the street at the Grand Royal Bathhouse, the situation was dropping into sheer, naked chaos.
Thirty wealthy merchant patrons and local judges had been peacefully soaking in the tiered cold-plunge pools, their eyes closed in relaxing contemplation.
Suddenly, the cold plunge pools began to rumble.
Tiny bubbles the size of pearls rose from the tiled floor drains, escalating within five seconds into a violent, frothing eruption of boiling foam!
“THE POOL IS SCALDING!” an obese merchant screamed, his pink skin turning lobster-red as he scrambled desperately over the tiled rim.
“MY BACKSIDE!” a judge wailed, leaping out of the water like a flying fish. It grabbed his scorched towel as twenty naked bathers stampeded toward the street in scared hysterics.
Across the entire three-square-mile expanse of the Southern District, the same impossible nightmare was unfolding.
Kitchen water basins began to simmer.
Public horse troughs started to steam like hot tubs.
The stone cobbles of the main thoroughfare grew so hot that stray street dogs began howling and dancing on their paws, unable to stand on the scorching stone.
Cracks between the ancient cobblestones began hissing, venting thin, high-pressure needles of scalding steam that whistled like tiny tea kettles.
“THE EARTH DRAGON HAS AWAKENED!” a street fortune-teller shrieked, throwing his wooden fortune-telling hexagrams into the air. “THE Underground DRAGON-PULSE IS BOILING! THE UNDERWORLD FIRE HAS BREACHED THE SEALS!”
Thousands of pedestrians began running in all directions, convinced an ancient fiery apocalypse had erupted beneath their feet.
Down on the Avenue of Hundred Elixirs, the apothecary masters watched in horror as their underground cooling cellars transformed into steaming sauna chambers.
Thousand-year-old ice-boxes—carved from northern ice-slow blocks to preserve delicate frost herbs—melted into warm puddles in minutes.
The clay storage jars containing fermented spirit wine began popping their wooden corks one after another like tiny artillery fire!
POP! POP! FIZZ!
Streams of foaming, hot liquor sprayed across the shelves, mixing with the billowing vapor to fill the street with the intoxicating, humid stench of boiled alcohol and healing ginseng.
“The Starry Cauldron of the Earth has inverted!” an ancient apothecary shouted, grabbing his armful of soggy scrolls as he fled into the street. “The Yin energy of the northern dragon-vein has been burned up by the supreme Yang Fire of the Heavens! We’re all about to be steamed alive like dumplings in a bamboo basket!”
Back inside the Master Teacher Pavilion, Frank was slowly peeling his work boots away from the melted green jade dais.
Schlurp.
The half-melted rubber soles came free with a reluctant, sticky suck. That left two black, charred boot prints embedded permanently into the glowing white stone.
Frank stepped off the dais onto the cooler marble flat stone slabs, his boots smoking slightly. That left faint scorch marks with every step.
He looked down at his feet, inspecting the treads.
“Lost about a sixteenth of an inch of rubber on the heels,” Frank muttered. He shook his head with deep skilled guilt. “That’s gonna throw off my stride when I’m carrying sheetrock.”
He paused, feeling the underground tremors shaking through the thick soles of his boots.
The screen in his eye flared with urgent water-flow diagnostics:
Frank’s eyes tracked the gauge pressure reading.
Eight hundred and twenty pounds of pressure.
“Eight hundred and twenty psi,” Frank said aloud. His voice dropped into the cold, cold and exact register of a disaster investigator. “In an enclosed limestone karst cave. With zero spreading tanks and zero pressure relief valves.”
He looked toward Grand Elder Yan, who was still kneeling in the dust. He looked up at him with respectful, tearful awe.
“Hey, Yan,” Frank called out. “Does this city have an engineered town storm drainage system with tuned relief bypasses?”
Yan blinked through his soot-stained eyelashes, fully confused. “Tuned... Relief... What?”
“A safety valve,” Frank said, gesturing sharply with his hands. “A pipe that lets high-pressure steam vent into the river before the boiler casing ruptures!”
“The... The Nine-Yin Cold River flows beneath the sacred bedrock,” Yan stammered, his scepter shaking. “It’s sealed by the ancient Dragon-Suppressing Stones placed by the Founding Emperor three thousand years ago! No mortal hand may breach the sovereign seals!”
Inside the grand hall, the three hundred master teachers scrambled toward the western windows. He peeked through the carved lattices in sheer, stone-hard disbelief.
To the high scholars of the Pavilion, this was not a failure of town piping or water-system pressure management.
It was the manifestation of the Primordial Earth Dragon’s Wrath. A mythical event recorded only in the pre-dynastic creation myths of the Central Plains.
“The Boiling of the Dragon Pulse...” Chief Judge Wu stammered, pressing his back against the shaking wall. “The ancient texts spoke of underground veins churning with divine heat!”
“He touched the bedrock strata,” Grand Elder Yan said, staring wide-eyed at the steam. “His breakthrough linked directly into the deep underground water beds of the plane!”
Princess Jiang Ling’er looked down at the weeping elders from the visitor gallery, her cold, analytical voice cutting through their holy hysteria like a sharp razor knife.
“It’s not crying out in joyous submission!” Ling’er scolded sharply. “It’s a standard overload phase change! Water expands by one thousand six hundred times its liquid volume when boiled away at eight hundred pounds of pressure! If we don’t vent this steam right away, the entire district will suffer an explosive total crustal failure!”
Frank closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose in sheer, pure disbelief.
“You sealed an underground river in an airtight granite box with no relief vents,” Frank said flatly. “And then you built a three-hundred-foot stone pavilion directly on top of the lid. That’s not a town foundation. That’s a five-square-mile pipe bomb waiting for a heat source.”
RUMBLE-BOOM—!
An ear-splitting underground explosion rattled the foundations of the pavilion.
A twenty-foot marble pillar in the rear gallery snapped at its base, tilting five degrees to the west as the bedrock beneath it shifted.
High in the eastern gallery, Princess Jiang Ling’er leaned over the rail. Her hair was tied back, her copper pressure gauge whistling loudly.
“Master!” Ling’er shouted down to the floor, her voice sharp and authoritative. “The deep water pressure has exceeded the fracture slope of the limestone ceiling! Flash vaporization has started across four cubic miles of underground water table!”
Shen Shitou stepped up beside her, his five-foot iron sledgehammer gripped with both hands, his knuckles white. “What’s the play, Master?! We ready to break ground?!”
Niu Mang grabbed his shovel, his eyes wide and alert. “I smell steam coming up through the floor grates, Master! It’s gonna blow!”
Frank took a deep breath. He reached down to unbuckle his heavy leather tool belt. It slid his framing hammer into its steel loop.
He adjusted his yellow carpenter’s pencil behind his ear.
“Class 404,” Frank commanded, his voice cutting through the rising panic like a circular saw through pine. “Pack the cart. Grab the heavy pry bars, grab the trenching spades, and get ready for emergency line venting.”
He looked toward the grand entrance doors of the pavilion.
Outside in the afternoon sky, the screaming of the citizens was suddenly swallowed by a sound that made the hair on the back of every fighter’s neck stand on end.
It was a rising, faster-than-sound shriek. A piercing, ear-splitting whistle that climbed in pitch until it felt like an iron needle being driven straight through the ears.
HISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS—!
Across the entire Southern District of Tianxuan Capital...
Every single stone well...
Every single public decorative fountain...
And every cast-iron sewer grate within a two-mile radius...
Erupted at the same time into roaring, sky-splitting geysers of blinding, white-hot white steam!