The Grand Avenue of Tianxuan Capital had transformed into a world-ending, roaring maze of white-hot vapor.
Columns of scalding steam, thick as ancient temple pillars and hissing with faster-than-sound fury, shot eighty arm-lengths into the midday sky from every stone well, sewer grate, and public fountain.
The air smelled of boiled sulfur, atomized river silt, and scorched flat stone slabs.
Clear sight was reduced to less than five paces.
Through the iron-hard white fog, dozens of city guards and town formation masters ran in wild. It screamed circles, their silk tabards soaked in boiling moisture.
“THE DEMON FIRE IS ERUPTING FROM THE UNDERWORLD!” a formation captain wailed, waving an ineffective blue water magic charm that boiled away into dry ash before it even touched the ground. “THE GATES OF PURGATORY HAVE OPENED BENEATH THE CAPITAL!”
“EVACUATE THE DISTRICT!” another officer shrieked, tripping over his own sword sheath and tumbling into a pool of bubbling water. “THE ENTIRE BEDROCK IS COLLAPSING INTO HELLFIRE!”
Amidst the blind, screaming pandemonium, the heavy carved oak doors of the Master Teacher Pavilion swung wide open.
Frank stepped out onto the wide stone roofed porch with calm, unrushed power, his hands resting easily on his leather tool belt.
Behind him walked his three apprentices, forming a tight, disciplined wedge.
Shen Shitou carried his five-foot forged sledgehammer at the ready, his massive forearms bent like cured hickory logs.
Princess Jiang Ling’er held her clockwork drafting ledger in one arm, her copper-and-brass steam pressure gauge unclipped and humming in her right hand.
Niu Mang jogged beside their supply cart. He carried two heavy hard dark metal-steel trenching spades over his broad shoulders, his farmer’s eyes scanning the street with tactical clarity.
Frank pulled his yellow carpenter’s pencil from behind his ear, tapped it against his thumb. Then he surveyed the disaster zone.
“Look at this town disgrace,” Frank muttered, shaking his head in disgust. “Zero pressure-relief valves. Unvented storm under-road drains. And twenty city officials running around flapping paper magic charms at an eight-hundred-psi steam line.”
He turned back toward his three students, his voice cutting through the ear-splitting hiss of the geysers like a master foreman taking charge of a flooded job site.
“Class 404!” Frank commanded, his voice sharp and total. “Standard emergency protocol! We have three minutes before high-pressure backing-up pressure blows the main road into the clouds!”
“Ready, Master!” the three chorused without a heartbeat of pause.
“Assignment one: Shen Shitou!” Frank ordered, pointing toward the intersection fifty yards ahead. There, three heavy cast-iron manhole covers were rattling wildly. It bounced two feet into the air like popcorn kernels on an open flame. “Those sewer caps are about to become high-speed missiles! Use moving tamping! Drop your sledgehammer onto the buckling caps to bleed the backing-up pressure through the vent holes without letting the rim fail!”
“Understood, Master!”
Shitou didn’t ask questions.
He broke into an earth-shattering sprint, his heavy work boots smashing through puddles of boiling water.
He reached the first rattling cast-iron manhole cover. Just then, a massive surge of steam threatened to launch the three-hundred-pound disc into the upper stories of a tea pavilion.
BOOM!
Shitou didn’t swing with anger. He swung with the tuned, downward dead-blow care of a pile-driver worker.
The twelve-pound forged hammer head struck the center of the iron disc with a bone-shaking CLANG that sent blast waves through the cobblestones.
The manhole cover slammed back into its cast-iron collar, pinned flat by Shitou’s huge physical weight. That forced the white-hot steam to vent horizontally through the four tuned cry holes in controlled, whistling jets!
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
Shitou moved from cover to cover like an unstoppable siege engine, tamping down every exploding sewer grate along the avenue, turning lethal high-speed projectiles into stable exhaust vents!
“Assignment two: Jiang Ling’er!” Frank yelled through the billowing steam. “We have upright heat siphoning along the north retaining wall! The heat draft is threatening to ignite the wooden roof edges of the merchant houses!”
“On it, Master!” Ling’er replied, her eyes flashing with razor-sharp bright glare.
She vaulted onto the low stone railing of a tea house, unfastening the twin copper exhaust vent tubes mounted to the side of their supply cart.
With lightning-fast fingers, Ling’er deployed two expandable brass baffle funnels. It slid them over the whistling stone wellheads.
She adjusted the variable wind-cutting vanes with tiny twists of her brass thumb-screws, calculating the Bernoulli pressure differential in her head.
FZZZZZZZZT—!
The wild, chaotic clouds of scalding steam that had been lashing against the wooden storefronts were instantly captured by the brass funnels.
Directed by Ling’er’s calculated nozzle shape, the steam was channeled into two massive, clear upright plumes that shot straight upward past the roofs, venting harmlessly into the cold autumn air eighty arm-lengths above!
“Draft lines steadied!” Ling’er called out, her fine china face glowing with triumph. “Surrounding surface heat levels dropping by forty-five degrees!”
“Assignment three: Niu Mang!” Frank barked, pointing toward the eastern intersection where boiling water was rapidly flooding toward the residential district. “The runoff is ponding in the depression! If that water seeps into the mud-brick foundations, the residential apartments will suffer differential settlement! Dig a sixty-foot drainage swale to bleed the scalding runoff straight into the eastern city moat!”
“Leave it to me, Master!” Niu Mang roared, a grin splitting his dirt-streaked face.
The burly farm boy planted his boots into the cobblestone curb. He raised his hard dark metal trenching spade with both hands. Then he plunged it into the street with superhuman speed!
CHOP-CHOP!
It wasn’t digging.
It was a heavy-duty ditch-trenching machine showed up in human form.
Niu Mang’s arms moved in a blur of terrifying agrarian driving force. It tore through stone cobbles, crushed gravel, and compacted clay like a trencher through sod.
In thirty seconds flat, a three-foot-deep, clean-edged drainage swale tore through five hundred yards of street, connecting the boiling floodwaters directly to the deep stone embankment of the royal moat!
SWOOOOOOOOOOSH!
The boiling floodwaters cascaded into the trench, rushing away from the fragile residential foundations and dumping harmlessly into the cold, deep waters of the moat with a massive, bubbling hiss!
The system screen in Frank’s eye updated with glowing green confirmation:
Across the clearing avenue, hundreds of citizens, shopkeepers, and town formation masters stepped out from behind stone archways and shuttered doorways.
They looked at the controlled, whistling steam plumes shooting harmlessly into the sky.
They looked at the secured, safely vented manhole covers.
They looked at the clean, perfect drainage trench carrying the scalding floodwaters safely away from their homes.
And then they looked at Frank’s three apprentices, who were casually wiping their tools and catching their breath beside their two-wheeled wooden cart.
Grand Elder Yan and the pavilion elders hurried out of the roofed porch. They stared at the street in stunned disbelief.
“The Divine Formation of Nine-Tide Mitigation...” Yan breathed, stepping onto the wet cobblestones. “Without a single magic charm. Without an incense altar. Three apprentices... Commanded by a carpenter... Steadied the entire avenue in three minutes!”
“Such precise discipline!” a visiting 2-Star Grandmaster exclaimed, shaking his head. “They move not as individuals, but as linked parts of a single crew. What kind of sect trains its students to handle natural disasters with spades and sledgehammers?!”
“Praise be to Class 404!” a chorus of merchants and citizens began to cheer, bowing toward Frank’s boots. “Praise be to Senior Master Lu, the Savior of the Southern District!”
The royal city guards dropped their spears in utter, dumbfounded shock.
For three ages, the capital guard post had been taught that natural disasters could only be subdued by summoning high-tier Formation Arrays or pleading for royal magic charms from the Potion-maker Guild.
Yet before their very eyes, an ordinary blacksmith’s apprentice had stopped five high-speed manhole explosions with four swings of a steel sledgehammer!
A young noblewoman had tamed twenty scalding steam geysers using nothing more than two copper tubes and the laws of fluid aerodynamics!
And a dirt-stained farm boy had dug a five-hundred-yard flood trench faster than an entire vanguard building battalion!
“Is this... What a real sect looks like?” a royal lieutenant whispered, clutching his dented breastplate. “No chanting? No sacrifice of spirit stones? Just... Pure, unbending, physical competence?!”
Shen Shitou wiped sweat from his broad forehead with the back of his leather apron, checking the seated manhole covers with a firm kick of his boot.
“All three covers seated flat, Master!” Shitou called out with pride. “Rubber rings held! Zero clearance play!”
Ling’er adjusted the brass screws on her baffle tubes. She took one final measurement of the air pressure.
“Vent plumes stable at sixty-eight cubic meters per minute,” Ling’er reported crisply. “The heat slope has dropped below the flash threshold. The street surface is fully safe for foot traffic.”
Niu Mang leaned on his shovel, laughing with hearty agrarian satisfaction as the last of the scalding runoff drained away into the moat.
“Told you, Master! Just like clearing irrigation canals before the summer monsoons! A good trench solves ninety percent of the world’s troubles!”
Frank dusted off his denim sleeves. It slid his carpenter’s pencil back behind his ear with a quiet, satisfied nod.
“Clean job-site triage,” Frank murmured to himself. “Ninety-eight point six percent damage mitigation. Not a single foundation compromised.”
The dense steam over the avenue began to fade, carried away on the cool autumn breeze.
The street was safe. The crisis was contained.
Frank turned toward his cart, ready to pack up their tools and finally begin the journey back to Ironwood Peak.
Suddenly, an extraordinary, fragrant aroma swept across the clearing street.
It wasn’t the smell of steam or wet mud.
It was the rich, packed, overwhelmingly potent fragrance of hundreds of rare spiritual herbs—ginseng, frost orchids, dragon-bone root, and spirit peaches—simmered together into an ungodly, mouth-watering hot-pot broth.
And riding upon that herbal aroma came a shriek of pure, world-ending, bloodcurdling agony that shattered the afternoon air.
“MY HERBS! MY FIVE-HUNDRED-YEAR NINE-YIN HERBS!”