The darkness inside the collapsed drift was total, thick with the heavy, stale silence of an underground cemetery.
Eighty men sat or lay in the mud, their breathing already growing rapid and shallow as the surrounding oxygen began to deplete. A single oil lamp burned on the floor beside Old Man Geng. Its flame flickered faint, yellow, and starved of air. It cast long, mournful shadows across the soot-streaked faces of the unsafe laborers.
The air was cooling rapidly, but it wasn’t the clean, invigorating chill of the upper valleys. It was a dead, tomb-like dampness, loaded with suspended stone dust that clung to the throat and lined the throat-pipe with a paste of white lime-chalk. Every swallow was dry and bitter.
Some cried quietly, clutching wooden old family tablets pulled from their damp tunics. Others prayed aloud to the Jade Emperor, promising three ages of temple incense if only the stone would open and grant them daylight. A few of the younger miners were clawing wildly at the fallen granite with their bare fingernails. It tore their skin on the sharp stone edges until bloody smears marked the rock.
None of them moved the boulder. They knew the brutal mathematics of stone. Even if all eighty men threw their shoulders against the rock all at once, fifty tons of granite anchored by earth-shaking friction wouldn’t budge a single tiny fraction of an inch.
Tie Shan stood beside Lin Tao, his heavy iron pry-bar resting across his broad shoulder.
The young giant looked down the dark drift at the huddled, shivering miners. His scarred face tightened with deep, tragic memory. Five years ago, in Sector Two, forty men had been sealed behind a similar collapse. The overseers finally cleared the drift three months later to reclaim the copper tools. Then, they found only gnawed bones and fingernails embedded in the rock.
“They won’t dig us out,” Tie Shan rumbled, his voice low and deep-throated like grinding stones. “Hu will let the air rot.”
“He has no choice,” Lin Tao replied quietly, his eyes fixed on the impassable stone face. “If eighty men walk out of this drift alive, his copper seal hangs him by noon. A dead miner produces no testimony.”
Lin Tao stepped up to the monolith.
The floor beneath his boots was slick with drainage slow leak and powdered shale. Every step sent a dull throb through his fractured left collar bone, reminding him that the human frame was fragile. It was bound by biology and bone thickness. But his mind was cold, running through the diagnostics of the chamber.
He reached out his right hand, pressing his blistered, callused palm against the cold granite. The rock was chilled, roughly quarried, and veined with tiny streaks of quartz and pyrites. Deep within the core of the stone, the crushing strain was huge, streaming a faint clockwork deep ring that shivered against his skin.
Through his left eye, the reality screen hummed into focus.
The green wireframe grid flared to life. He cast an eerie soft glow across the flat surfaces of the tunnel. While the seventy-nine miners saw only a solid, impassable wall of dark stone, Lin Tao saw the underlying shape:
Every polygon in this decaying world was rendered on a finite care grid. The ancient Precursor stonework that governed the physical laws of this realm didn’t simulate true nonstop mass. It approximated physical boundaries using bounding volumes and flat crash meshes.
And two massive crash meshes collided at high speed during an unscripted load-bearing collapse. Then, the underlying physics engine rarely calculated a clean intersection.
Lin Tao raised his left thumb to his lips.
He took the four-inch cold-drawn steel metal pen from his belt, placed the sharpened tip against the thick callus at the base of his thumb, and pressed firmly until the needle pierced the skin by exactly a tiny fraction of an inch.
A sharp, familiar prick of body pain shot up his forearm. A single bead of dark crimson blood welled up around the steel shaft.
He grounded his mind in the physical reality of flesh, bone, and nervous heat flow.
[Branch checked: main thread]
He wasn’t hallucinating. The cold dampness of the drift was real. The ragged wheezing of eighty choking men was real. The fifty tons of granite before him was real.
Old Man Geng raised his head from his knees, watching Lin Tao’s strange, deliberate ritual with wide, superstitious eyes. The flickering yellow lamplight caught the tears running down the deep creases of the old smith’s cheeks, highlighting the trembling in his scarred hands.
“Lin Tao,” the old man rasped. His voice shook like dry grass in an autumn gale. “What are you doing? Are you offering your blood to the earth spirits? It’s useless. The Mountain God has sealed this gate. No sacrifice will move fifty tons of mountain.”
Lin Tao didn’t look back. He slowly withdrew the metal pen from his thumb, wiping the crimson bead along the groove of the needle.
“The Mountain God didn’t build this tunnel, Old Geng,” Lin Tao said, his voice flat, steady, and devoid of fear. “Men carved it with chisels, and the rock fell because the wooden props was rotten. The wall is only stone. And stone has seams.”
Lin Tao stepped closer to the left junction where the fallen monolith met the natural bedrock wall. The air near the floor was already growing dense with invisible carbon dioxide. That made his lungs feel heavy and unrefreshed.
“Douse that lamp,” Lin Tao ordered quietly.
“What?” Old Geng gasped, clutching the battered brass lamp to his ribs as if it were his own beating heart. “In the dark? We’ll die blind and shivering in the black mud!”
“A single oil flame consumes as much air as three grown men,” Lin Tao said. His tone left no room for argument. “Douse it now. If you want to see tomorrow’s sun, save your breath.”
Tie Shan stepped forward without a word. He leaned down and blew out the yellow flame with a single heavy puff of air.
Total, choking blackness fell over Sector Four.
In the pitch-black void, the miners held their breath. They listened to the slow, measured footsteps of Lin Tao moving along the stone face. They tapped the cold granite with his iron metal pen. The silence was thick, pregnant with terror. Eighty men waited in the dark for a miracle or an unmarked grave.