The air in Sub-Foundry Three crackled until Lin Ke’s teeth felt like they were made of tin foil.
In the center of the dark rock vault, the transformer bank—three massive iron coils wound with copper cable the thickness of a man’s thigh—was glowing a dark, cherry-red. Acrid white smoke curled from the gutta-percha heat padding. He smelled of scorched resin and burned rubber.
“The throughput is too high!” Master Bao Hong yelled over the spark hum, throwing an iron bucket of dirty cooling oil over the copper windings with a violent hiss. “The self-running slip-feeders are clearing requests ten times faster than the old shift! That means ten times the reactive back-EMF dumping into these basement coils! If we don’t ground this surge within two watches, the transformer core will melt into liquid melted rock waste, collapse into the lower magma channels, and blow Foundry Nine into orbit!”
“Where does the current go right now?” Lin Ke asked, shielding his face from the blasting heat.
“A single cast-iron ground rod driven into the cellar floor,” Bao Hong spit. He pointed to a four-inch iron post glowing white-hot in the center of the flat stone slabs. “It was forged for manual scribes writing thirty slips an hour! It can’t handle a thousand concurrent requests!”
