“They’re merely clerks,” Lord Lei Qian had declared from his amethyst throne, waving a flagon of vintage nectar with contemptuous grace. “How difficult can it be to move an iron stick and sign a paper? Send the Court Apprentices. Let the Elder Daoists show the rabble that divine power needs neither grease nor commoners.”
And so, forty-eight Grand Elder Immortals of the Ninth Court dropped to the Primary Dispatch Hall.
They were splendid creatures. Their silken robes were woven from moon-moth cocoons and stitched with golden star-patterns. Their long, silver beards reached their belts, perfumed with sandalwood and crushed mountain orchids. Each had spent two to three thousand years thinking about the calm, poetic mysteries of the Dao, writing seven-character quatrains about the transient nature of mountain mist.
They had never touched an iron wrench in their immortal lives.
Down in Foundry Nine, Lin Ke sat on a wooden crate beside the sound listening pipe, sharing a pot of bitter green tea with Master Bao Hong and Meng Shan.
In his sea of mind, Lin Ke evaluated the elders’ working intervention.
Scenario: Forty-eight classical philosophers try to operate an ancient, distributed high-voltage air-powered routing end-post.
The failure was not just predictable. It was exact poetry.
