With a wet, tearing sound like old masking tape ripping off damp sheetrock, Supreme Grand Elder Tie Kuang peeled himself out of the basalt floor.
His eleven-foot demonic Asura form had collapsed entirely. The towering volcanic bulk shrank back into an eight-foot mortal frame. His razor-sharp obsidian scales had shed into heaps of gray cinder, his spiked Earth-Dragon armor hung in shredded ribbons around his hips, and his broken nose dripped a steady trickle of dark crimson onto his bare, soot-caked chest.
Yet, as Tie Kuang looked up at Austin through his one swollen, blackened eye, those amber irises blazed with terrifying, unhinged fervor.
He looked like a man who had stared into the heart of the sun and come away born again.
Tie Kuang dropped onto his scraped knees. He folded his bruised, calloused hands before his chest and threw his forehead against the obsidian floor with such violent devotion that the stone chimed like an anvil.
*CLANG!*
"Disciple Tie Kuang thanks the Patriarch for imparting the Supreme Dao!" Tie Kuang bawled, hot tears and mucus streaming down into his gray beard. "For eighty years, this worthless old dog was blind! Trapped in the petty vanity of hammer strikes, bloodline arts, and brute force! But today... today the Patriarch’s single divine tap revealed the True Law of Creation!"
He drove his forehead into the stone again: *CLANG!*
"The Dao of Leverage! The Fulcrum of All Creation! The Sacred Law of Mechanical Advantage! Master! Please take this worthless old fool as your apprentice! Let me carry your sacred blue spanner! Let me sweep the shavings from your holy floor! Even if I am only deemed worthy to grease your axle pins and wipe down your conveyor rollers, I beg the Patriarch to take me in!"
Down in the ten-foot-deep Basalt Slag Holding Basin, Director Tie Feng and five hundred armored battle miners stared in paralyzed, catatonic horror.
Their Supreme Grand Elder. The Iron-Blooded Butcher of Canglan Province. The terror of eighteen border wars, who had boiled three rival sect leaders in bronze cauldrons during the Silver River Rebellion.
The man was sobbing like a toddler on a basement floor, begging a youth in faded denim overalls for the privilege of holding a wrench.
Director Tie Feng didn't hesitate. Forty years of bureaucratic survival in the imperial mining ministry kicked in with lightning speed.
"ALL MEN KOWTOW!" Tie Feng shrieked at the top of his lungs, his voice echoing out of the pit. "KOWTOW TO THE PATRIARCH OF THE COSMIC SPANNER! WE HAVE ENTERED THE SECT OF THE SACRED LEVER!"
*CLANG-CLANG-CLANG-CLANG-CLANG!*
Five hundred battle miners hit the gravel simultaneously, slamming their iron helmets against the crushed basalt in frantic, terrified harmony. Five hundred voices chanted in ragged devotion: *"GREETINGS, PATRIARCH OF LEVERAGE! SPARE OUR LIVES, DIVINE SPANNER LORD!"*
Austin stood in the center of the hall, blinking in utter, deadpan exhaustion.
He looked down at Tie Kuang, whose forehead was already swelling into a plum-colored knot from kissing the floor tiles. He looked over the rim of the pit at five hundred armored miners frantically banging their kettle helmets against the drainage gravel.
Austin slowly reached up, pinched the bridge of his nose, and pulled up his system HUD with a weary flick of his thumb.
Austin stared at the settlement prompt, rubbing his temples where a sharp headache was taking root.
"Alright, hold your horses," Austin said, his flat contractor voice cutting through the chanting like a circular saw through drywall. "First off: I don't take apprentices. I’m a solo contractor. I don't run a trade school, and I sure as hell don't run a religious cult. Second off: nobody touches my conveyor rollers. I spent three hours yesterday setting up an automated drip-feed capillary manifold. If you touch those brass oilers with your greasy paws, you'll throw the oil flow completely out of whack."
Tie Kuang’s face went white with sheer existential panic.
"Master! Patriarch! Please do not cast me out into the outer darkness!" Tie Kuang pleaded, his hands trembling as he reached toward Austin’s boot before yanking them back, terrified of fouling the denim. "We have gold! The Iron Pavilion controls eighty-two gold mines across Canglan! We have spirit stones! Refined meteoric ingots! Heaven-grade demon cores! We can give you the wealth of three imperial provinces!"
"I don't need your spirit stones," Austin said, holding up his pressed-fiber clipboard like a shield. "What I need is immediate structural restitution for the absolute disaster you just made on my active job site."
Austin clicked his yellow grease pencil against the wood, reading off the citation items with administrative detachment:
"Item one: you blew a twelve-foot hole straight through my eastern load-bearing retaining wall, compromising the slope stability. Item two: you atomized two thousand pounds of low-grade iron into high-silica airborne dust, which settled all over my precision needle bearings. Item three: your three-hundred-ton broken auger is blocking my primary emergency exit corridor and drainage trough."
Austin adjusted his safety spectacles and peered down over the clipboard at Tie Kuang.
"Under standard municipal building code enforcement and property damage statutes, I can hit you with an immediate fine of ten million gold, or..." Austin paused, his eyes narrowing slightly, "...you and your five hundred and thirty-two crew members can work off the damages through unpaid penal community service."
Tie Kuang’s breath hitched in his throat.
His eyes dilated, his heart thumping against his ribs in wild, manic disbelief.
*Unpaid labor?!* the Grand Elder's soul roared in religious ecstasy. *To labor beneath the personal gaze of the Living God of Mechanical Order?! To breathe the ozone-rich air of His divine workshop every single day?! To touch the holy tools of the First Epoch with our own hands?!*
"WE ACCEPT!" Tie Kuang roared, slamming his forehead into the basalt tiles once more: *CLANG!* "WE ACCEPT THE SACRED PENANCE! The Iron Pavilion surrenders its bodies, its tools, its sweat, and its blood to your divine workshop! We will bleed for your foundations, Patriarch!"
Austin blinked. "Nobody needs to bleed. That creates a biohazard and violates basic bloodborne pathogen standards. Just grab a broom."
Austin turned toward his secondary storage rack and hauled three large wooden crates across the floor with a heavy clatter.
"Here are your shift assignments," Austin instructed, tossing a stack of duplicate clipboards into Tie Kuang’s trembling hands. "Task number one: take the industrial vacuum canisters and cotton mops and clean up every single speck of airborne dust and iron powder from the floor tiles, conveyor belts, and tool benches. Task number two: dismantle that broken Colossus into manageable scrap pieces using hand wrenches and cold chisels, and feed the raw iron into the blast furnace hopper. Task number three: mix high-strength polymer-epoxy mortar and rebuild that eastern breach."
Austin pointed the yellow grease pencil directly at Tie Kuang's nose.
"The reconstructed wall must be planar to within zero point one millimeter. If I put an aluminum box-beam level against that mortar line and I see a gap wider than a human hair, or if the plumb line is off by even half a degree, you tear the whole thing down to the footing and start over. Understood?"
"ZERO POINT ONE MILLIMETER!" Tie Kuang repeated, his eyes blazing with fanatical zeal. "Not even a wandering soul shall slip between the joints! It shall be aligned with the celestial axis of the cosmos!"
"Right. Now put on your PPE," Austin said.
He kicked open the wooden crates, revealing rows of equipment he had fabricated earlier in the week from scrap canvas, boiled leather, and tinted resins: five hundred bright-yellow safety hard hats and neon-orange reflective vests.
"Safety protocols are strictly enforced on this site," Austin stated firmly. "Hard hats and high-visibility vests must be worn on the factory floor at all times. Eye protection is mandatory during grinding operations. And anyone caught failing to maintain three points of contact on a ladder will have their lunch rations docked. No exceptions."
He handed the first bright yellow hard hat to Tie Kuang.
Tie Kuang received the yellow shell with trembling, reverent hands, his chest heaving with emotion.
To the Grand Elder, this was the Golden Crown of the Dao of Mechanical Order. A sacred relic personally bestowed by the Living God of Leverage to mark His chosen labor disciples.
With tears streaming down his soot-smeared cheeks, Tie Kuang placed the yellow hard hat atop his bald skull, snapping the plastic chin strap shut with a sharp, ceremonial click.
"I am sanctified," Tie Kuang whispered into the dust.
Ten minutes later, the heavy oak door at the top of the spiral cellar staircase creaked open.
Sect Master Gu Qing and the six council elders of the Clear Sky Sect crept nervously down the stone steps. Every single elder had their ancestral flying sword drawn, their bodies trembling with tension, bracing themselves to find Austin’s mutilated corpse and a workshop crawling with imperial butcher squads.
Gu Qing took a deep breath, stepped off the bottom riser onto Floor 1, and raised his primary defensive talisman.
He stopped dead.
His jaw unhinged so violently that his teeth clicked together. His ancestral flying sword slipped from his fingers, clattering uselessly against the stone floor.
Standing in the center of the brightly lit cavern was Supreme Grand Elder Tie Kuang—the Blood-Bearded Butcher of Canglan—wearing a bright yellow construction hard hat and a neon-orange reflective vest.
The terrifying grand elder was holding a wet cotton string mop, humming a cheerful, rhythmic work cadence, meticulously mopping the obsidian floor tiles with smooth, overlapping figure-eight strokes. He paused every three paces to inspect the floor reflection for streaks.
Nearby, fifty armored battle miners in matching yellow hard hats were cheerfully disassembling the massive three-hundred-ton Colossus with hand wrenches and pry bars, chanting in cadence: *"Left loosey, right tighty! Hail the Spanner! Praise the Thread!"*
Over at the eastern breach, Director Tie Feng stood beside a smoking mortar trough, clutching an aluminum level and screaming furiously at a burly miner:
"Level it, you blind dog! Did you not hear the Patriarch's decree?! Zero point one millimeter tolerance! If this mortar line shows even a millimeter of wobble, I will hang you by your ankles from the bucket elevator until your teeth fall out!"
Gu Qing stood frozen, his eyes bulging as his entire understanding of the cultivation world dissolved into mist.
Austin walked calmly past the paralyzed Sect Master, carrying a brass oil can and a clean rag, nodding politely as he passed.
"Morning, Sect Master," Austin said casually. "Got the cleanup crew sorted out. Floor 2 excavation starts tomorrow morning at eight sharp."