The scream was drowned out by the shriek of parting steel.
Fifty feet above the central smelting ramp, the braided cable of the main ore hoist groaned. A high, agonized screech that shook through the granite floor plates. Three strands unraveled with the sound of snapping harp strings, whipping through the rotten-egg smoke like steel scythes.
Lin Ke halted on the narrow high walkway, his wrapped right hand resting against the iron railing.
Below him, on the thirty-degree incline leading from the main blast furnaces down to the melted rock waste cooling trenches, sat Cart Twelve.
It was a monstrous, riveted iron hopper, eight feet wide and twelve feet long, filled to the brim with seven tons of bubbling, molten stone-glass melted rock waste fresh from the belly of Kiln One. The surface of the melted rock waste glowed dull orange, crusting over with black glassy scum that vented plumes of toxic sulfur dioxide.
The leftover cable strands snapped.
SNAP.
The sound cracked like a siege cannon across the smelting floor.
* * *
The eight-ton cart jerked backward, free of the winch.
Gravity took hold. The heavy iron wheels, ungreased and grooved for the narrow-gauge track, began to roll down the thirty-degree slope with terrifying gaining speed.
At the base of the ramp, trapped in the narrow under-road drain between the blast wall and the drainage trench, twenty outer laborers were shoveling lime. They had nowhere to run. The under-road drain walls were sheer dark rock, ten feet high. If the boiling melted rock waste hopper reached the bottom, it would jump the buffers, roll over them, and submerge twenty men in liquid rock.
Mass: eight thousand pounds, Lin Ke’s mind calculated with icy speed. Slope: thirty degrees. Gravity gaining speed along track: four point nine meters per second squared. Speed at bottom impact: twelve meters per second. Moving driving force: ninety-six thousand two-pound-meters per second. Lethality: total.
While the laborers screamed and scattered in blind panic, a single figure stepped out from the lime crew.
He was a giant of a young man, barely nineteen years old, with shoulders like an ox and a torso carved from rough-hewn granite. His bare chest was smeared with soot and gray quarry dust. His face was square, heavy, and expressionless.
Meng Shan.
Meng Shan didn’t shout. He didn’t look for an escape route.
He lowered his balance point, sank his heavy work boots into the ballast stones between the iron rails. Then he drove both hands forward, bracing his calloused palms against the front buffer of the runaway hopper.
THUD.
The first crash sounded like a boulder striking a mountain.
Meng Shan’s boots slid backward through the crushed ballast, plowing two deep trenches through stone and iron dust. His skin—usually a dull bronze—flushed a violent, sickly mottled gray-black as every vein in his neck and forearms swelled to the thickness of heavy hemp rope.
He was trying to stop an eight-ton avalanche with brute muscular leverage and a raw Qi Gathering Stage 1 earth-attribute manual.
Deadly failure coming soon, Lin Ke realized. He watched from the stairs as he bounded down three steps at a time. His channel stonework can’t handle the flow pushback. He is absorbing moving shock into his organic tissue faster than his energetic loop can fade the load.
Meng Shan’s teeth cracked together.
Blood—thick, dark, and speckled with gritty black stone flakes—surged from his nose and ears. His main thigh blood vessels were bulging against the skin of his thighs like trapped snakes. In three seconds, the high-pressure backing-up pressure inside his cardiovascular system would blow his main heart artery wide open.
Lin Ke hit the bottom of the ramp.
He didn’t try to stand beside Meng Shan. Adding seventy pounds of starved bone to an eight-ton runaway mass was bad math.
Instead, Lin Ke scanned the trackbed.
Beside the rail sat a heavy oak braking wedge, three feet long and banded with rusted steel, used for chocking parked hoppers. Lin Ke scooped it up with his uninjured left arm, sprinted around the plunging cart. Then he lunged toward the left rear wheel.
He didn’t drop the wedge flat against the rail. If he laid it flat, the wheel would simply mount the wedge and derail the hopper into the under-road drain wall, tipping the boiling melted rock waste sideways onto the crew.
He drove the wedge under the left rim at a strict forty-five-degree slanted, kicking the steel-banded heel hard with his boot.
SCREEEEEECH.
The oak wedge bit between the spinning cast-iron wheel and the pipe rim of the steel rail.
The angled friction vector converted forty percent of the cart’s linear driving force into spinning shear and lateral drag. The wheel screamed as the iron pipe rim gouged into the oak, shaving off thick curls of smoking wood, heating the track to a dull cherry glow.
The moving load dropped below the threshold of total collapse.
Meng Shan felt the sudden change in pushback. With a deep-throated, primal roar that shook the soot from the ceiling beams, the giant drove his heels down into the cross-ties, locking his knees and throwing his entire body weight into the buffer plate.
The iron cart shudders wildly.
The wheels locked, sliding twenty feet through scree and crushed melted rock waste, showering the under-road drain with blinding cascades of orange sparks.
Three paces from the trapped lime crew, the eight-ton hopper ground to a complete, total halt.
* * *
Silence dropped over the under-road drain. It was broken only by the bubbling hiss of the cooling melted rock waste and the stench of scorched oak.
Meng Shan stood for two seconds, his chest heaving, steam rolling off his bare shoulders in thick white waves.
Then his knees gave way.
The giant collapsed onto one knee in the ballast, both hands bracing against the frozen iron rails. He convulsed wildly, his mouth opening in a silent gag as he vomited a massive puddle of thick, black dark blood directly onto the trackbed.
The blood was full of tiny, dark granules. Hardened stone melted rock waste rejected by his failing blood-vessel system.
Around the under-road drain, the surviving laborers crawled out from the corners. None of them moved to help the man who had just saved their lives.
Instead, an outer sect work boss leaned over the upper railing. It spat a wad of bitter betel nut into the dust beside Meng Shan’s shoulder.
“Look at that useless rock-veined mule,” the work boss sneered, laughing with cruel derision. “He thinks he’s an iron golem! Look at him vomiting his own melted rock waste! His channels are clogged with dead quarry rock—he won’t survive the third watch!”
Another laborer kicked a pebble toward Meng Shan’s boot. “Drag him to the corpse trench before he dies on the tracks. He’s blocking the morning shift.”
Lin Ke stepped forward through the smoke.
He stood directly between the collapsed titan and the laughing crowd, his grey clerk robes snapping in the fire draft, his copper office medallion gleaming cold in the red glare of the melted rock waste.
Lin Ke looked down at Meng Shan.
The giant’s gray, calloused hands were trembling like dry leaves in an autumn gale, his pulse fluttering like an overloaded engine on the verge of throwing a rod.
Lin Ke reached into his sash, his fingers brushing the cool steel of his iron metal pen.
Check-up needed, Lin Ke thought, his eyes flat and merciless as he stared at the men above. Root cause analysis begins now.