Indigo dusk settled over the Canglan Provincial Capital, thick with the greasy stench of fried spiced lotus root, spilled rice wine, and thousands of hoarse throats shouting about tournament brackets. Out in the citadel squares, drums thumped and cheap fireworks popped against the stone parapets. Down in the streets, nobody was sleeping.
Inside the Grand Imperial State Suite, the racket muffled down to a dull, low-frequency hum.
Heavy red sandalwood paneling soaked up the city noise. Carved white jade basins trickled water into quiet drainage channels, and heavy gold brocade curtains blocked out the torch glare from the courtyards below. Reserved for high-ranking royal envoys and wandering domain princes, the suite felt cavernous, over-decorated, and entirely too drafty.
Austin didn't give a damn about the silk curtains.
Right in the middle of the private study, resting flat on a massive rosewood worktable, sat the twelve-inch matte-black cube: the First Epoch Machine Terminal Interface Root Core.
Over by the brass-latched double doors, Li Xiaoyao and Southern Sword Saint Jiang Taixu stood guard.
Or rather, Jiang Taixu stood like a marble statue in an earthquake zone.
The four-hundred-year-old sovereign still wore his shredded white robes, patched together with rough gray linen strips like an emergency field dressing. But behind his right ear gleamed a freshly whittled blue carpenter’s pencil, and strapped tight across his patrician nose was a pair of dark-tinted UV safety goggles. Even in the dim glow of the tallow candles, Jiang Taixu refused to drop the eye protection. He stood at rigid attention, chest puffed out, knees locked straight as dried bamboo, his breathing shallow and religious as he tracked Austin’s hands.
Austin picked up a brass caliper, squinted through his smudged spectacles, and sighed.
"Subcontractor Jiang."
Jiang Taixu stiffened further, his jaw clenching. "Disciple is vigilant! The boundary remains inviolate!"
"Loosen up your legs, man," Austin grunted, tapping the brass slide gauge against his own thigh. "You stand with your knees locked on a long watch, venous return tanks. Blood pools in your calves, your brain starves, and five minutes from now you're taking a nosedive onto the floorboards. Concussions ruin the shift schedule. Give yourself a shoulder-width stagger. Soften the knees. Let the hips take the load."
Jiang Taixu’s eyes widened behind his tinted lenses. A shudder of profound enlightenment rattled through his frame.
"Ergonomic foundation alignment..." the old sword saint whispered, voice thick with awe. "The Master reveals the secret standing pillar of the ancient builder-gods! Fluid circulation retained! Dantian pressure equalized!"
Slowly, reverently, Jiang Taixu shifted his left heel two inches outward, sinking half an inch into a relaxed tradesman's stance.
Beside him, Li Xiaoyao already had his birch ledger open, graphite pencil poised. "Master, should I log Subcontractor Jiang's posture compliance on the daily safety walk sheet?"
"Log it," Austin said, adjusting his spectacles with a knuckle. "Job-site documentation ain't optional. Every apprentice logs their hours, their near-misses, and their ergonomic corrections. Builds good habits before somebody drops a girder on their foot."
"Understood!" Xiaoyao scribbled furiously, his tongue poking out between his teeth in pure concentration.
Under the rosewood table, Cerberus Pug lay sprawled across a plush crimson velvet carpet. The eight-hundred-pound beast didn't care about ergonomic posture, ancient god-relics, or safety records. All three squashed, wrinkly heads snored in staggered, wheezing harmony, paws occasionally twitching as he chased phantom roasted pheasants through his dreams.
Austin pulled a heavy cedar stool up to the table. His steel-toed boots hit the floor with a dull, solid thud that settled the room.
He leaned in close, bringing his eyes four inches from the recessed interface on the cube’s northern face.
"Look at that," Austin muttered, clicking his tongue against his teeth. "Standard six-pin serial bus. Gold-plated copper pins on a two-millimeter pitch. Clean blind chamfers, zero contact oxidation despite three thousand years buried in an unconditioned glacial vault. That is proper MIL-SPEC electroplating. Somebody actually cared about manufacturing tolerances."
He unzipped the leather tool pouch on his belt. Out came a pair of brass needle-nose pliers, an insulated terminal strip, a folding utility knife, and six short lengths of heavy-gauge solid copper grounding wire salvaged from the lightning arrestor back on Sunset Peak.
Austin flipped open the utility blade. With smooth, thumb-guided pressure, he stripped a quarter-inch of insulation off each copper lead. The bright metal gleamed under the candlelight. He twisted the strands between calloused fingers, rolling them into tight, solid pigtails.
"Rule number one of terminal wiring: watch for stray whiskers," Austin muttered, squinting closely at the copper ends. "One loose hair of copper bridges pin three to pin four, and bang—you dump line voltage straight into the logic gates before the filter caps even wake up. There's no next-day shipping in this world. No replacement boards. You scorch an integrated circuit here, and you're stuck trying to build transistors out of galena crystals and jeweler's wire."
Jiang Taixu leaned forward, his knuckles white against his belt. "A single metal hair brings ruin upon the divine vessel... truly, the Dao of Precision is more ruthless than the Nine Heavens Heavenly Tribulation."
"It's just basic bench work, Jiang," Austin grumbled.
He picked up the needle-nose pliers. With steady, practiced dexterity, he guided each copper jumper into the recessed socket.
*Click.*
*Click.*
*Click.*
The improvised female leads seated over the gold pins with clean, positive tactile snaps.
Austin tugged gently on each wire. Solid mechanical retention. Zero play.
"Harness seated," Austin said, wiping a thumb across his forehead. "Pinout verified against standard industrial wiring specs: positive rail, negative ground, high-speed transmit, high-speed receive, clock sync, and chassis ground. Specification calls for four hundred and eighty volts DC to prime the bootloader firmware."
He pushed the cedar stool back three inches, squaring his boots against the floor.
His right hand reached out toward the raw copper leads.
Down in his lower dantian, the pearl-sized White Dwarf Seed sat anchored at the center of his being. Burning at three hundred thousand Kelvin with ninety-five quintillion kilograms of degenerate stellar mass, the miniature stellar furnace hummed with terrifying atomic power.
Austin didn't fling out raw lightning. Flashing sparks was amateur hour.
Instead, he tightened his internal meridian valve down to a microscopic orifice. Using the First Epoch Containment Mesh like an ultra-stable, solid-state step-down transformer, he metered the cosmic output with cold, calibrated restraint:
*Voltage Target: Exactly 480.0 Volts DC.* *Current Limit: 2.5 Amperes.* *Ripple Voltage: < 0.01%.* *Baud Rate Negotiation: 56,000 bps.*
Austin pinched the bare copper leads between his thumb and forefinger.
*BZZZZZZT.*
A sharp blue corona of static snapped around his knuckles. The smell of hot ozone filled the study, cutting right through the lingering scent of sandalwood and old tea leaves.
For three seconds, the black cube stayed dead. Ice cold. Inert.
Then, deep inside the three-thousand-year-old alloy chassis, a tiny mechanical relay clicked.
*Clack.*
An internal piezoelectric diaphragm cleared its throat.
And then, splitting the midnight quiet of the imperial suite, an abrasive, ear-gouging digital shriek erupted:
*SCREEEEEEEEE-AWWWWW-CHIK-CHIK-KRRRRRR-DONG-DONG-SHSHSHSHSH!*
It was the raw, uncompressed, nostalgic roar of a 56k dial-up modem screaming for a carrier frequency!
Jiang Taixu launched two vertical feet off the floorboards, his sandals slapping down with a frantic clatter!
"VOID DEMONS!" the Sword Saint bellowed, his hand reflexively clutching his empty hip where his ancestral flying sword used to hang before Austin turned it into structural scrap. "The ancient mechanical titan awakens with the wrath of ten thousand flayed souls! Master, beware! It chants an acoustic soul-severing hex!"
Austin didn't even flinch. He flapped his left hand backward without looking away from the terminal.
"Quiet down, both of you! Shut your face! It’s just the modem audio negotiation handshake! Eight data bits, no parity, one stop bit! Nobody touch the line! You pick up the extension downstairs during carrier negotiation and you'll drop the sync and corrupt the file allocation table!"
The jagged screeching warbled, climbed through a brassy whistle, flattened into a rush of pure white noise, and snapped clean off.
*BEEP.*
A crisp, high-pitched electronic chime bounced off the cedar rafters.
Instantly, the fine laser-etched channels across all six faces of the black cube ignited into vivid, pulsing cyan phosphorescence!
*HUMMMMMMMMM.*
From the top face of the cube, a wide-angle holographic projector flared to life.
A column of coherent blue light punched straight toward the ceiling. Swirling waterfalls of electric-blue binary code, rotating planetary wireframes, and ancient topological elevation grids unfurled across the room. Cyan light bathed the rosewood walls, dancing across the jade fountains and reflecting off Jiang Taixu’s tinted goggles like a miniature aurora borealis.
Austin’s ocular HUD hooked into the data stream, locking onto the active bus with a series of sharp system prompts:
Austin stared at the floating vector model, grinning from ear to ear.
The wireframe spun slowly in mid-air. It showed a massive, multi-tiered underground installation carved miles into the bedrock of the western mountains. Even the raw engineering specs were breathtaking: multi-layered blast doors, triple-redundant atmospheric airlocks, high-voltage transformer yards, deep-bore geothermal tap wells, and robotic containment bays built for matter manipulation.
"A pre-collapse underground research vault," Austin whispered, his grin splitting wider. "Five hundred and twenty kilometers due west. And this twelve-inch black box isn't just a backup server. It's the master RFID badge that opens every airlock in the complex."
He leaned back on his stool, locking his fingers behind his head. The relief hit him like a cold draft on a sweltering afternoon.
"Season Four is looking like a clean speedrun," he muttered, chuckling under his breath. "No crawling through sewer grates. No farming keys off trash mobs in waist-deep sludge. No ninety-minute lever puzzles while poisonous gas vents into the hallway. I walk up to the front portal, badge in, and stroll straight to the main distribution frame."
Behind him, Jiang Taixu sank to his knees on the sandalwood floor. The old cultivator stared up at the rotating blue wireframe, tears leaking out from beneath his dark goggles and wetting his silver beard.
"The celestial cartography of the Ancestors..." Jiang Taixu murmured in trembling awe. "The hidden dwellings of the primeval gods, summoned by the Master's bare hands and a length of scrap copper..."
Austin reached toward the terminal to disconnect the jumper leads. "Alright, data pull is done. Let's unhook before the capacitors—"
He never finished the sentence.
A sudden, violent surge of ancient First Epoch data signals and electromagnetic back-EMF spiked backward through the copper wires!
*CRACK!*
High-voltage inductive kickback tore through Austin’s palms, ripping up the arm meridians like liquid fire. The data payload didn't dissipate into his flesh. It drove straight down the main conduit, plunging straight into his lower dantian!
Deep-space data logs. Compression records from a civilization that moved moons and hollowed asteroids. Planetary core calibration matrices, compressed into millions of dense mathematical pulses.
The White Dwarf Seed swallowed the data torrent whole.
Inside his dantian, the temperature rocketed past five hundred thousand Kelvin with a deafening, sub-atomic roar!
Gravitational compression redoubled. The thin envelope of hydrogen atoms blanketing the degenerate electron core hit critical thermonuclear fusion density!
*DING!*
A clean, ringing tone shattered the quiet of Austin's skull.
The system banner flashed across his retina in burning gold:
**The Spark of the Main Sequence!**