The bunkhouse didn’t have walls so much as stacked slabs of porous fiery dark rock held together by dried mud and cow hair.
Wind whistled through the finger-wide gaps. That brought in the greasy stench of coal melted rock waste and cooled animal fat. Thirty-two slaves slept on four tiers of untreated pine planks, packed together like cordwood for warmth.
None of them took off their hemp tunics. In the Seventh Smelting Ward, if you took off your shirt at night, someone stole it before your eyes shut, and you froze to death before the morning gong.
Lin Ke lay on the bottom plank, closest to the damp floor.
His breathing sounded like a dry spade scraping against frozen shale. Every time his chest muscle swelled, a dull, rhythmic ache throbbed in his hip sockets. It sent tiny needle-pricks of pain down the femurs into his shins.
He didn’t sleep.
In production, you didn’t sleep while an unhandled critical alert was flashing amber across your console.
He drew a slow breath through his teeth, held it for three counts, and focused his intent inward.
Status report, he thought. Give me the hardware metrics.
The pale grey status box materialized in the darkness behind his closed eyelids. It was steady, sharp, and narrow enough that he didn’t have to scan his eyes from side to side.
Lin Ke stared at the readout in his mind.
Non-dilating.
In his past life, Colin Shaw had seen junior network engineers try to force forty gigabits of uncompressed tracking data through a legacy ten-megabit copper hub. The result was always the same: total packet loss, heat runaway, and melted plastic.
Training manuals on this world operated on analog dilation. Normal fighters inhaled surrounding spiritual Qi, swelled their flexible flesh vessels like rubber hoses. Then they tightly packed the energy into a swirling pool in their lower dantian.
If Lin Ke tried a traditional breathing technique, his brittle glass channels would shatter like frozen light bulbs under the first high-pressure wave.
That explains why the last tenant died, Lin Ke thought, his jaw tight. The boy tried to breathe like the elders taught him, and his own plumbing tore itself to shreds.
Another alert flashed below the first:
Nineteen days.
Lin Ke reached down and tapped his left shinbone with his knuckle.
The sound that returned was not the muffled thud of living bone. It was a sharp, dull clink, like striking an unglazed terracotta brick.
The Azure Cloud Sect gave every newly arrived fire slave a tattered woodblock print titled the Iron Marrow Manual. The overseers claimed it was an act of immortal benevolence. A sacred body-refining technique to give mortal laborers the strength of iron and the endurance of stone.
It was a kill switch.
The manual deliberately bypassed the kidneys and liver, routing crushed iron-stone-glass melted rock waste from the fire dust directly into the skeletal marrow. It made starving seventeen-year-olds strong enough to shovel eighty tons of coal a day for six months, until their bones fully stone-hard, their blood cells ceased producing. They dropped dead in the ash heap.
Zero severance. Zero pension debt. Fully disposable public works.
Someone backdoored this manual three hundred years ago, Lin Ke realized, his pulse quickening with cold disgust. A hungry design pattern baked right into the introductory documentation.
He checked his current command buffer:
Tian Fu, diff meatspace against raw baseline.
Lin Ke exhaled a long, shuddering breath.
He couldn’t purge the iron melted rock waste tonight. Forty percent of his skeleton was already dead stone. If he dissolved the minerals without an organic replacement, his legs would collapse under his own body weight like wet chalk.
He had to freeze the write operations.
Suspend all automatic Qi intake, he instructed the system. Kill the background daemon for the Iron Marrow technique. Lock the intake gates at the base of the spine.
A hollow ache right away bloomed in his gut.
Without the artificial stone stimulation from the scripture, his starved body felt the full, crushing weight of physical starvation. His stomach acid burned like lye against an empty stomach lining.
Lin Ke rolled off the pine plank onto his hands and knees.
The cold dark rock floor bit into his calloused palms. Crawling silently through the snoring bodies of his fellow slaves, he navigated the pitch-black bunkhouse toward the corner storage nook.
Near the coal shovels sat a wooden tub of raw limestone flux—coarse, white lime-chalk used to pull phosphorus dirt from molten iron in the crucible.
Lin Ke picked up a dry chunk about the size of a pigeon’s egg. He crushed it between two smooth cobblestones into a gritty white powder, cupped it in his palm. Then he tipped it into his mouth.
It tasted like dry plaster and bitter-salt chalk. He swallowed it dry, his throat spasming as the skin-burning powder coated his throat-pipe.
Ten seconds later, the violent chemical reaction hit his stomach acid. The burning lye sensation pulled back, replaced by a dull, bloated warmth as the calcium stopped the hydrochloric acid.
It wasn’t food. It wouldn’t rebuild muscle tissue or repair nerve endings. But it stopped his stomach from digesting its own lining for another eight hours.
He crawled back to his plank, pulled his knees to his chest. Then he pulled the metal pen from his waistband.
He touched the scarred pad of his thumb.
“Status checked: holding pattern.”
* * *
CLANG. CLANG. CLANG.
A heavy bronze gong wildly tore through the bunkhouse air. It echoed off the dark rock walls with bone-shaking force.
“Up, you dead dogs! Out of the straw!”
The wooden door was kicked off its leather hinges, slamming flat against the stone floor. Overseer Fang stood in the frame. She held a smoking pine torch in his left hand and his coiled copper whip in his right.
Behind him, through the open doorway, the night sky over the smelting ward was lit with a violent, pulsating orange glare.
A deep, sub-bass shaking shook the bunkhouse foundations, rattling the loose stone slabs in the walls. It sounded like an angry giant beast trapped beneath five hundred feet of granite, grinding its teeth against the world’s roots.
“Furnace Nine has an unstable heat swell!” Fang bellowed, his voice hoarse with panic. “The lower tap-hole is bulging red! Elder Wu has ordered five hundred pounds of grade-three spirit iron tapped before the third watch. Or the entire ward’s grain ration is canceled for a month!”
The slaves scrambled off their planks in total terror, tripping over each other in the darkness, weeping and shouting prayers to whatever ancestor gods might hear them.
They knew what an unstable heat swell meant.
When Crucible Nine swelled, the molten metal reached ten thousand pounds of pressure of deep water pressure. Last autumn, when Fire Four blew its belly, the jet of boiling iron cut sixteen men in half before they could reach the blast gate.
Fang’s eyes scanned the panicked crowd, searching until they locked directly onto Lin Ke.
The overseer’s lip curled in a grimace of desperate malice.
“You,” Fang barked, pointing the tip of his braided whip straight at Lin Ke’s chest. “You claimed you knew why the draft was wrong. Get your miserable hide down to the crucible floor. You’re holding the main tap-rod.”
The other slaves drew back in horror, giving Lin Ke a wide berth.
Holding the tap-rod meant standing four feet from the clay plug. Just then, the white-hot spirit iron burst from the belly. If the melted rock waste surged, the man holding the rod had a survival rate of less than ten percent.
Lin Ke stood up slowly from his plank.
His knees clicked. His stomach was a heavy lump of limestone sludge. His glass spirit veins thrummed with a cold, crystal-clear warning in the corners of his vision:
Lin Ke looked Fang in the eye.
There was no fear on the boy’s face. Only the cold, weary focus of an engineer walking into a data center that was already burning.
“Bring three iron crowbars and two bags of dry river sand,” Lin Ke said.
Fang blinked, startled by the flat command. “What?”
“If you open the tap-hole with a standard clay punch while the core is surging, the air backdraft will detonate the crucible,” Lin Ke said, his voice cutting cleanly through the screaming slaves. “Get the sand, Overseer. Unless you want to explain to Elder Wu why your pension blew up with the fire.”
Without waiting for an answer, Lin Ke walked past the overseer into the howling orange glare of the night.