When Austin pushed open the screen door of the Timber Lodge, he found Superintendent Tie Kuang standing on the porch, panting so hard his braided dwarven beard was quivering like an unbalanced driveshaft.
In his trembling, soot-blackened hands, Tie Kuang held three scorched, melted copper bus-bars that were still dripping foul-smelling melted gutta-percha insulation onto the cedar deck.
*Sssss... drip.*
Austin’s nose wrinkled as a noxious cloud of vaporized petroleum resin, roasted sulfur, and superheated copper oxide wafted across the porch. Beside his boots, Cerberus Pug took one sniff, sneezed from all three noses simultaneously, and retreated behind Austin’s legs.
"Master Austin!" Tie Kuang wheezed, his thick brass safety goggles fogged with condensed grease. "The Western Valley Distribution Substation just exploded! The main four-inch copper feeder trunk didn't just trip a breaker—it melted into a sixty-foot puddle of liquid bronze! The ceramic insulators shattered like clay pigeons, and the grounding rod literally turned to glass!"
Austin frowned, sliding his aluminum clipboard from beneath his arm:
"Melted? How could a four-inch copper trunk melt? We’re generating five exawatts of baseload power from the Level 65 Capstone, but the regional feeder lines to the mining valley were strictly sized for twenty-five megawatts. The entire valley’s peak demand last week was only twelve megawatts. A four-inch bus-bar can carry forty thousand amps before thermal expansion even registers on an infrared thermometer."
"That was last week, Master Austin!" Li Xiaoyao shouted, sprinting up the porch steps so fast he nearly lost his yellow hard hat. In his arms, the young sect administrator clutched a stack of smoking imperial utility ledgers, their rice-paper pages singed along the margins. "Look at the power meters! Over the last seventy-two hours, total electricity consumption in the Canglan Mining District has surged by one thousand four hundred percent!"
Austin snatched the top ledger, his yellow grease pencil tracing the spiking line graph:
Austin stared at the numbers, his jaw tightening in exasperation.
"Jevons Paradox," Austin muttered, dragging his hand down his face. "Classic, textbook Jevons Paradox. I gave them clean power, and they immediately proved a nineteenth-century coal study."
Tie Kuang blinked, using his flannel cuff to wipe his safety lenses:
"Master Austin... what in the name of the Ancestors' anvils is a 'Jevons Paradox'?"
"In 1865, a British economist named William Stanley Jevons observed that when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used, the rate of consumption of that resource doesn't decrease—it increases exponentially!" Austin’s voice rose, carrying across the valley. "People assume that if an engine uses half as much coal to produce a horsepower, society burns half as much coal. But society doesn't! Because power is cheap, society invents a thousand new ways to burn coal until total consumption skyrockets through the roof!"
Austin pointed his yellow grease pencil down into the valley, where hundreds of newly erected brick workshops and smelting sheds were spewing white steam into the morning sky:
"When electricity was expensive, cultivators treated it like sacred dragon marrow. They only used it for critical infrastructure—mine ventilation fans, emergency pumps, and security lighting. But the moment I stabilized the Second Sun, issued Sunset Peak Power Vouchers, and dropped wholesale power to one copper per kilowatt-hour, what happened? Every blacksmith threw out their charcoal forges and bought four electric resistance smelters! Every alchemy guild hooked twelve continuous boiling retorts to the line! And now, the common folk are charging electric rickshaws in their yards!"
"It’s worse than that, Master Austin!" Xiaoyao confessed, eyes wide. "My own second cousin bought three automated forty-spindle electric silk looms, twelve radiant space heaters for his chicken coops, and an industrial electric foot massager with four vibrating jade rollers! When I asked why his massager drew five kilowatts while he slept, he told me that because electricity is practically free, turning off an appliance is an insult to the Sovereign’s grace!"
Austin pinched the bridge of his nose:
"Your cousin’s vibrating chicken coops and foot massagers just flashed thirty miles of high-voltage transmission lines into vapor."
"Come see for yourself, Master Austin," Tie Kuang pleaded, gesturing toward the trail. "The local district magistrates are in a state of rebellion. They’re standing outside the scorched substation with empty buckets, demanding we turn the celestial lightning back on!"
Ten minutes later, Austin, Tie Kuang, and Li Xiaoyao stood at the lower terrace overlooking the Canglan Mining District.
Through his contractor transit binoculars, Austin surveyed the industrial carnage.
The pastoral valley of two months ago had transformed into a buzzing sprawl of unregulated electrical experimentation. Down on Main Street, eighty-four wooden blacksmithing shacks had knocked out their walls to install humming induction crucible furnaces. Blacksmiths clad in leather aprons weren't swinging hammers; they were sipping barley wine while five-hundred-amp induction coils melted pig iron into glowing white soup in thirty seconds flat.
Next door, the Cloud Mist Alchemy Guild had erected a three-story wooden scaffold packed with four hundred continuous glass retorts. Every retort was strapped to an electric hot plate glowing cherry-red. Instead of cultivating internal true-fire to refine pills, apprentice alchemists simply turned dials to *Setting 7: High Simmer* and played dice in the alleyway.
"Look at those distribution lines," Austin growled, adjusting the focal ring.
Between the rough-hewn pine utility poles, the four-inch copper cables were sagging toward the ground like wet clotheslines. Thermal expansion from overcurrent had stretched the metal so severely that cables were dipping fourteen feet below design clearance, brushing against pine trees. Every time the wind blew, blue corona discharge crackled from the lines, setting dry pinecones ablaze with sharp *SNAP-HISS* pops.
Down at the crossroads, an enterprising merchant had set up a commercial dragon-carriage charging depot. Forty carriages—retrofitted with crude lead-acid battery packs salvaged from scrap golems—were plugged into an unholy nest of daisy-chained extension cords. The main tap was a bare copper rod shoved directly into the ground conduit, cooled by an apprentice alchemist dumping buckets of river water over the sizzling metal.
"Look at that cable management!" Austin’s eye twitched. "That’s not an electrical installation! That’s a suicide pact signed in thirty-gauge magnet wire! If an OSHA inspector saw that daisy chain, they'd have a stroke on the spot!"
"The demand cannot be stopped, Master Austin," Xiaoyao whispered nervously. "The Great Yan Capital sent an imperial courier. The Emperor wants forty gigawatts for capital foundries. The Northern Sword Sects want sixty gigawatts to run automated whetstone grinding wheels. The Southern Silk Consortium wants fifty gigawatts for climate-controlled silkworm greenhouses. The continent has tasted limitless power, and they are gorging like starving wolves!"
Tie Kuang wrung his calloused hands:
"Can't we just forge thicker copper cables, Master Austin? If four-inch copper melts, we forge eight-inch copper! We fell ten thousand more pine trees, string twelve parallel trunk lines across the mountain passes, and run them straight to the capital!"
Austin lowered his binoculars and looked at Tie Kuang like the dwarf had suggested balancing a diesel crankshaft by duct-taping rocks to the flywheel.
"Thicker copper cables? Tie Kuang, do you know what $I^2 R$ loss means?"
Tie Kuang scratched his braided beard: "Is it... an ancient curse of the Earth Spirits?"
"It’s basic Ohm’s law and Joule heating!" Austin snapped, pulling his grease pencil and drawing on the back of Xiaoyao’s ledger. "Power loss in a conductor is proportional to the resistance multiplied by the square of the current! When you transmit electricity at terrestrial voltages across three thousand miles of mountain terrain, wire resistance eats your power alive. If we run copper through the mud, forty percent of our five exawatts will be lost as useless heat before it even reaches the border!"
Austin tapped the grease pencil against the paper:
"And that’s assuming the line survives. What happens during the spring thaw? A mudslide wipes out twenty miles of poles. What happens during mating season? Earth-drake lizards chew through the conduit because it smells like warm sulfur. And what happens every time some drunken rogue cultivator on a flying sword tries an aerial loop-de-loop through the passes? He shears through a 500-kilovolt transmission line, turns into a cloud of purple mist, and knocks out power to half the continent!"
Tie Kuang and Xiaoyao stared at the smoking valley, crestfallen.
"Then... what do we do, Master Austin?" Tie Kuang groaned. "Do we shut down the vouchers? Do we tell the miners and blacksmiths to go back to swinging hammers and burning charcoal?"
"Never," Austin said instantly. His jaw set with absolute contractor resolve. "A contractor never downsizes capacity to match inadequate infrastructure. You don't tell the customer to stop using electricity; you build a delivery system that makes their overload look like a rounding error."
He turned away from the valley, looking straight up into the crystal-clear blue sky above Sunset Peak.
High above them, the twin stars of *Sol-Alpha* and *Sol-Beta* were spinning in their immaculate 714-RPM waltz, pouring raw exawatts of clean thermonuclear vitality into the upper atmosphere. Down below, the earth was a choked, muddy bottleneck of dirt roads, rocky ravines, and fragile wooden poles.
"The mud is our enemy," Austin declared. "We are not going to run cables through the dirt. We are not going to fight landslides, tree branches, or flying swords."
Xiaoyao blinked: "If we don't run cables along the ground... how do we get power across the continent?"
Austin flipped his clipboard to a fresh sheet of heavy drafting vellum, pulled a two-foot steel rule from his back pocket, and sketched bold, geometric lines:
"We go up. Straight up."
Tie Kuang and Xiaoyao leaned over his shoulders, watching the grease pencil lay down the outline of a soaring, four-legged open-lattice tower that rose from the mountain peak, pierced through the cumulus clouds, punched through the troposphere, and anchored in the upper stratosphere.
At the summit, Austin sketched an enormous ring-shaped antenna five hundred meters in diameter, surrounded by parabolic reflectors.
"A **High-Altitude Stratospheric Skyway and Space Elevator**," Austin stated, his voice ringing like an anvil. "One hundred thousand feet of Grade-6 continuous vacuum-arc titanium box-trusses anchored directly into Sunset Peak’s granite bedrock. At the summit, above cloud cover and atmospheric moisture, we install a multi-terawatt microwave power broadcast array."
Austin tapped the ring at the top:
"Instead of dragging copper through three thousand miles of mud, we convert our five exawatts into tightly focused, high-frequency microwave beams. We beam power straight through the vacuum of the upper stratosphere. Every city, every mining valley, and every sect simply builds a ground rectenna array—a giant chicken-wire grid that catches the microwave beam and converts it back into alternating current with ninety-five percent efficiency!"
Tie Kuang’s mouth hung open so wide his pipe fell, clattering onto the cedar deck.
"One... one hundred thousand feet?!" Xiaoyao squeaked, his voice cracking three octaves. "Master Austin... that’s thirty thousand meters! That penetrates the Nine Heavens! That reaches into the realm of the Void Sovereigns!"
"It reaches the stratosphere, where atmospheric attenuation drops to zero," Austin corrected without missing a beat. "And the four titanium legs will house dual high-speed linear mag-lev elevator hoists, giving us continuous freight transit to the upper atmosphere."
Tie Kuang picked up his pipe with a trembling hand, staring at the blueprint in religious terror and engineering awe:
"A tower to the stars... built of titanium and lightning..."
"A tower to fix our distribution bottleneck," Austin said dryly, snapping the clipboard shut. "Tie Kuang, stop drooling on the vellum. Mobilize Jiang Taixu and the framing crew. We have forty deep-bored foundation footings to drill, and fifty thousand tons of high-strength concrete to pour."