Riding an internal thirty-foot bronze freight lift down from the Astral Bridge, Pei Xuan and his specialists arrived at Deck 12: The Lower Heavy Industrial & Armory Bay of the buried Star-Fortress Canglan Ark.
The moment the lift doors slid open, Alchemist Boom-Pot Sun, General Tie Zhan, and Frost-Giant King Gu Shan practically drooled onto the silver floor plates.
Stretching out for fifteen miles through the lower belly of the warship was a cavernous industrial foundry. Standing in two neat rows down the center of the bay were fifty colossal, three-hundred-foot-tall Ancient Star-Forges shaped like bronze dragon-furnaces!
Each Star-Forge had ten automated thousand-ton hydraulic stamping hammers, a network of overhead conveyor tracks, and thick magma-intake pipes that ran straight down through the bottom of the ship into the earth’s natural deep-mantle heat veins below thirty-five miles!
Beside the fifty Star-Forges lay the ship’s main military armory—where over one hundred thousand cracked Rank 5 and Rank 6 Spirit-Light Rifles, three thousand dented Heavy Star-Artillery Barrels, and mountains of unrefined Star-Iron Ingots were stacked in dusty racks.
“Look at the size of those stamping hammers!” Frost-Giant King Gu Shan ran over to the nearest three-hundred-foot Star-Forge and patted a hammer head the size of a three-story house. “Lord Pei! My grandfather told me stories about these! Ten thousand years ago, our Titan Clan ancestors stood beside these furnaces and forged armor plates for the Star-Fleet! Look—the handholds on the tongs are built for thirty-foot hands!”
