The heat wafting from the open check hatch smelled like molten tin.
Thirty paces away, the draft roared inside the stone chimney of Kiln Nine, a low, low, deep rumble that rattled the teeth in Lin Ke’s jaw. Even at minimum idle, the exhaust chimney pipe was an active fiery shaft, streaming four hundred degrees of shimmering, dry heat.
Meng Shan stood beside the staging platform, stripped to the waist.
His broad torso was a rich mix of old melted rock waste burns, whip scars, and pale puncture marks from Lin Ke’s iron needles. Across his massive shoulders lay a thick yoke of green willow wood, chained to an eight-hundred-pound slab of dense, fired baked-clay baffle plate.
The giant’s hands were steady, but the veins on his neck were throbbing with dark, anxious heat.
“If you enter that shaft with an unpartitioned breath flow,” Lin Ke said, his voice quiet beside the giant’s shoulder, “the external heat wave will trigger an immediate flow pushback spike in your chest nodes. Your blood pressure will triple in four seconds. Your heart will suffer total arrest.”
Meng Shan turned his heavy, stone-hewn face toward Lin Ke.
“I remember the five needles, Brother Lin,” Meng Shan rumbled, his voice like boulders shifting under river water. “The weight left my chest. But when I lift... The fire still tries to climb my throat.”
“Because you’re still thinking in a single loop,” Lin Ke replied.
* * *
Lin Ke pulled his iron metal pen from his sash and drew three distinct, parallel lines in the soot caked on Meng Shan’s massive forearm.
“Your body isn’t a single water wheel,” Lin Ke explained in plain, grounded physical terms. “You possess three wide, parallel stone aqueducts running down your spine. The Azure Cloud elders told you to pour all your blood into one ditch. That made the banks to collapse.”
Lin Ke tapped the first line.
“From this moment, you operate the Distributed Earth-Core Stance.”
“Shard One,” Lin Ke said, tapping the outer edge of Meng Shan’s forearm. “You don’t fight the heat. You open the outermost epidermal vessels and let the skin absorb the radiant heat energy. It turned it into water’s skin. Treat your skin like baked clay.”
He tapped the center line.
“Shard Two: The load. When eight hundred pounds of baked-clay presses into your spine, you don’t hold it with your lungs. You route the moving weight straight down the dorsal spine bones, through the pelvis, and drive it through the heels into the bedrock. Let the mountain carry the stone.”
He tapped the third line, closest to the giant’s wrist.
“Shard Three: Internal buffer. The core channel reserves forty percent of your earth Qi strictly for blood-vessel steadying. It acts as a pressure damper, keeping your heart rate flat regardless of what happens to the skin or the spine.”
Meng Shan closed his eyes.
The giant’s breathing slowed, dropping to three deep, underground cycles per minute.
Within his massive chest, the three parallel energetic channels separated. It was a painful mental reconfiguration—like asking a man to play three different drums with three different hands at the same time—but Meng Shan possessed the terrifying, unbending stubbornness of a mountain mule.
A dull, stony gray flush crept across Meng Shan’s skin.
His flesh didn’t look like human tissue anymore. It looked like weathered dark rock dredged from a deep river trench, dense, non-porous, and unbending.
“Now,” Lin Ke commanded softly. “Carry the plate.”
Meng Shan opened his eyes. They were clear, dark, and utterly devoid of fear.
With a single, smooth heave from his hips, Meng Shan lifted the eight-hundred-pound baked-clay baffle plate from the staging blocks. The heavy chains clattered against his bronze collarbones, biting into his flesh. But not a single drop of blood escaped. His skin had hardened into stone-like thickness.
He took three massive strides, ducked his head, and stepped directly into the four-hundred-degree roaring belly of the exhaust chimney pipe.
* * *
The stonework crew gasped, several apprentices crossing their fingers in protective warding gestures.
Inside the upright chimney, the air was a howling vortex of sulfur gas, flying sparks, and blistering rising heat currents. The heat was enough to curl human fingernails into crisps within ten breaths.
Lin Ke stood at the check hatch, watching through an iron visor.
Inside the glowing chimney pipe, Meng Shan climbed.
His iron-shod boots found the narrow iron rungs bolted into the chimney walls sixty years ago. Every step was deliberate, heavy, and ringing. The blasting heat washed over his bare back, but Shard One absorbed the heat shock. That turned his dark rock-colored skin slightly glazed, like pottery in a kiln.
At thirty feet, he reached the load-bearing bracket.
With a massive grunt that sounded like an earthquake, Meng Shan swung the eight-hundred-pound baffle plate into the chimney throat.
The heavy baked-clay slotted into the granite grooves with an ear-splitting CLANG.
Without pausing, Meng Shan drew four ten-inch steel drift-pins from his tool belt. With no room to swing a sledgehammer inside the tight shaft, the giant simply pressed his bare, stone-hard palms against the pins and shoved them into the pre-drilled granite anchoring holes with pure, unbending high-pressure force.
The pins seated flush. The baffle was locked.
A minute later, Meng Shan stepped back out of the check hatch into the cool air of the smelting floor.
He dropped the wooden yoke onto the flat stone slabs.
Clouds of boiling steam hissed from his bare shoulders as the mountain air hit his white-hot skin. But his breathing was slow, calm, and fully regular. Not a drop of blood trickled from his nose. Not a single vein bulged out of place.
He looked down at his calloused, dark rock-grey hands, then turned his gaze toward the kiln.
Behind him, the masons slammed the backup intake baffles into place and sealed the iron draft dampers.
The character of Kiln Nine changed instantly.
The ragged, sputtering roar of dying pine wood vanished. In its place, the fire produced a deep, rhythmic, whistling purr. The clean, wind-cutting sound of preheated five-hundred-degree draft air screaming through the recuperator into the glowing charcoal bed.
The burning was total. No black smoke escaped the stack. Only a faint, shimmering mirage of pure heat.
The brass fire gauge mounted on the crucible wall began to climb.
Nine hundred degrees. Eleven hundred degrees. Thirteen hundred degrees.
With a final, sharp click, the brass needle pegged against the stop-pin. One thousand five hundred and fifty degrees.
Hotter than high-grade Black-Flame Coal. Cleaner than royal coke. All achieved using worthless wet pine charcoal and recycled chimney heat.
The smelting floor went dead silent.
The master mason dropped his iron tongs. He stared at the blazing bright white belly of the crucible with tears of awe in his eyes.
Meng Shan walked slowly across the flat stone slabs, stopping two paces before Lin Ke.
The giant sank slowly onto both knees, placing his massive, stone-hard fists together in a formal warrior’s salute, bowing his head until his forehead nearly touched the soot-covered floor.
“My life is yours, Brother Lin,” Meng Shan rumbled from the depths of his chest. “Command me, and I’ll hold up the mountain.”