“Stick waterwheels in the Dead-Ship Gravity Whirlpool?”
Standing beside the bridge guardrail, Whirlpool Captain Black-Fin—who had just been fished out of his Leviathan skull by Old Wei’s grapple hook and stuffed into a yellow Debtor vest—stared at Pei Xuan as if the young mayor had lost his mind.
“Lord Pei, that isn’t river water down there!” Black-Fin shouted over the deafening roar of the black canals. “Those are ten-thousand-fold crushed star-core currents! One splash of that black tide can squash an iron battleship into a tin coin! Even if you forge a waterwheel out of hundred-foot-thick refined star-iron, the moment you dip a paddle into that ditch, the gravity tide will snap the axle like a dry twig!”
[New Debtor: Whirlpool Captain Black-Fin (Rank 7 Early)] [Loyalty: 46/100 (Terrified of the Whirlpool’s Force)] [Current Thought: I lived here for eighty years! That black current has enough brute force to grind small moons into flour! How can you treat a cosmic catastrophe like a village flour mill?!]
“Snap the axle?” Pei Xuan smiled and leaned over the stone parapet, watching the heavy black currents surge past the bridge piers like two endless rivers of black mercury. “A normal iron wheel breaks because it tries to resist the gravity instead of drinking it. In my village, the stronger the river pushes, the more grain the millstone grinds.”
