The disaster arrived not from a careless pickax, but from a decaying timber wooden props prop fifty paces down the drift.
The stone-hard hardwood beam, weakened by hundreds of years of sulfur steam and rot, finally gave way under the shifting earth-shaking load. With a sound like a cracking whip, a six-foot splinter of stone-hard timber snapped loose from the ceiling, tumbling into the drainage gutter.
As it fell, the jagged timber struck the cracked Precursor glass channel.
The impact didn’t break the channel, but it tore away the leaden patch that ancient miners had slapped over the fissure.
A high-pressure jet of boiled away spiritual energy erupted from the pipe with an ear-splitting, faster-than-sound shriek. The violet spark discharge intensified, transforming from tiny snapping sparks into a blinding curtain of raw, dancing lightning that lit up the entire drift in violent bright purple light.
The air inside the drift spark-charged instantly.
The hair on Lin Tao’s arms stood straight up. A thick, metal taste of ozone and burnt copper coated the back of his tongue. Tiny blue corona discharges flickered from the iron brackets on the walls and the tips of Tie Shan’s fingernails.
The methane gas in the ceiling pocket was already at four point nine percent—the exact stoichiometric threshold for total sky blast.
A large globule of glowing, white-hot melted rock waste detached from the leaking channel and began to fall straight toward the pooling gas pocket near the water line.
If that spark touched the gas, ten thousand cubic feet of methane would ignite. The explosion would blow out the air-flow shafts, collapse the mountain above Sector Nine, and burn up every living soul in the lower pits.
The old miner shrieked in mortal terror. It pressed his face into the boiling mud. He clawed at the stone as if trying to dig his own grave before the flash arrived.
Tie Shan stood frozen. His eyes were wide in the blinding violet glare, the air pressure dropping so fast his ears popped. The air pressure in the drift dropped two inches of liquid silver in half a second, sucking the breath from their lungs.
Lin Tao didn’t think about death. He thought about grounding.
In a spark fault, current always seeks the path of least pushback to ground. The human body was a poor guide-rod compared to solid metal, but in this flooded drift, the entire floor was a grounded salt-water plate.
Lin Tao lunged forward. It slid through the hot sulfur slurry on his knees. It ignored the scalding water that soaked through his trousers. He threw his entire balance point toward the falling arc.
He didn’t possess insulating rubber gloves. He didn’t have a breaker switch.
He held the four-inch cold-drawn iron land-mapper’s metal pen in his bare right hand. He pointed the four-sided plumb-tip straight at the falling spark, while driving his left hand—wrapped in the spider-silk cord—deep into the stone-rich water between his knees.
Be the ground wire.
In his mind’s eye, the test settings were clear. Passive current shield engaged, ground fault bypass initialized across human carbon wetware. The body warning flashed with extreme heat recoil risk, but there was no alternative path.
The falling globule of white-hot melted rock waste never touched the methane gas.
The forty-eight-thousand-volt potential difference jumped across the six-inch air gap. It struck the tip of the iron land-mapper’s metal pen like a direct lightning strike.
A blinding flash of blue-white light swallowed the cave.
The spark current surged through the cold-drawn iron, entering Lin Tao’s right palm, tearing through the median and outward nerves of his forearm, crossing his chest, and exiting through his left arm into the salt water.
Lin Tao’s entire muscular system locked in a violent, tetanic seizure.
His jaw clamped shut so hard that his back teeth cracked. Blood sprayed from his nose and ears as his inner body heat spiked instantly to forty-one degrees. His right palm charred black, the smell of roasted meat filling his nostrils as the extreme current boiled the moisture in his under-skin tissue.
The spark pulse crossed his heart muscle, interrupting the sinus rhythm of his heart. For three painful seconds, his heart fluttered in chaotic fibrillation, unable to pump blood to his brain. His vision erupted into a blizzard of green and violet glowing artifacts.
Yet he didn’t let go of the needle.
The current traveled through his body directly into the water plate. Because of that, it bypassed the surrounding air. The methane gas didn’t ignite.
The spark died. The violet lightning along the channel collapsed into a dull, hissing violet leak, grounded into the bedrock through Lin Tao’s flesh.
The current cut out as the channel’s automatic safety valve choked off the flow.
Lin Tao collapsed forward into the black slurry, his right hand smoking, his breathing reduced to a shallow, rattling gasp.
Tie Shan rushed forward, throwing his massive arms around Lin Tao’s chest, lifting him cleanly out of the boiling gutter and carrying him back to the dry stone ledge at the drift mouth.
“Lin Tao!” Tie Shan yelled, the voice breaking in his throat.
Lin Tao lay limp in the young giant’s arms. His right hand was a blackened, blistered ruin. His chest was convulsing with uneven heart tremors.
Slowly, with painful effort, Lin Tao forced his trembling left hand to move.
He took the blunt tail of the scorched land-mapper’s metal pen and drove it a tiny fraction of an inch into the thick callus of his left thumb.
Pain. Scorching, painful, living pain.
The sharp body pain shock reset the sinus node of his heart. His pulse steadied, beating in strong, ragged thumps against his ribs.
Lin Tao opened his right eye. His vision was swimming with red static, but his voice was clear.
“The gas... Didn’t blow,” Lin Tao whispered.
Tie Shan looked at the scorched palm, then into Lin Tao’s unblinking eyes. Tears of pure, ferocious loyalty tracked through the coal soot on the giant’s cheeks.
“You lived,” Tie Shan whispered. “You saved us.”