At one hundred thousand feet above the mortal world, the dead silence of orbital space was broken by the sharp, metallic snap of a six-hundred-ampere rotary disconnect switch.
Standing on the summit catwalk of the Skyway docking crown, Austin adjusted his gold-tinted faceplate against the blinding, unshielded brilliance of low-orbital noon. Before him sat the master control console of the Superconducting Orbital Broadcast Array.
The thirty-meter parabolic dish gleamed like a mirror of pure silver and polished beryllium-copper, pointed downward at a shallow twelve-degree depression angle toward the sprawling continental landmass below. Internally cooled by closed-loop liquid helium to 4.2 Kelvin, the dish’s superconducting feed horns had reached absolute electrical perfection: zero ohms of internal resistance, zero thermal noise, and ninety-nine point nine percent aperture efficiency.
Beside Austin stood Tie Kuang, his pressurized white suit bulging with pride, and Patriarch Guang Ming, whose gold-visored helmet reflected the curved blue crescent of the planet floating in the velvet void.
"Master," Tie Kuang spoke through the local UHF loop, his deep voice crackling with excitement over the quiet hiss of the life-support compressors. "The thirty ground rectenna stations have completed their pre-energization continuity checks! From the capital of Great Yan in the east, to the Iron Pavilion in the south, to the Snow-Mountain Sects in the northern peaks—all thirty reception arrays are tuned to two point four five gigahertz!"
Austin leaned over the console, checking the digital sensor feeds streamed up the elevator's fiber-optic line.
"Thirty stations," Austin murmured, his yellow grease pencil checking off each node on his aluminum clipboard. "Every rectenna farm is three miles wide, paved with half-wave dipole antennas and gallium-arsenide diodes. They’ll convert the incoming microwave power directly into high-voltage direct current with eighty-eight percent efficiency. Then they'll feed it into local three-phase inverters."
Austin looked at the circuit-tuning gauges on the panel.
"Hot atmospheric air normally bounces microwave signals back," Austin explained, pointing his pencil at a pair of dials. "We pulse the microwave beam with our gravity waves. The ripples clear an open channel right through the upper air. Zero scatter, zero signal loss, and zero bird-cooking in the clouds."
Guang Ming clasped his insulated gloves together in breathless reverence, his golden visor trembling. "To cast the sacred fire of the sun across four thousand leagues of mountain and river without a single hanging copper wire... truly, the Great Contractor has woven the Invisible Meridians of the Firmament! In the ancient scriptures of the First Epoch, this is the Supreme Net of Indra—the Heavenly Web of Boundless Illumination!"
"It’s just wireless power transmission, Guang Ming," Austin sighed. "Nikola Tesla figured out the core principles in Colorado Springs in 1899. He just didn't have a thirty-kilometer titanium tower, liquid helium superconductors, or fifteen exawatts of binary stellar output to overcome atmospheric attenuation."
He placed his hand upon the primary transmission busbar lever.
"Switchboard check. Floor Nine capacitor reserves?"
"Full, balanced, and locked, Master!" the underground apprentice responded through the superconducting intercom line from thirty kilometers below.
"Main dish phase-alignment?"
"Zero point zero zero phase error, Master! Tracking locks confirmed across all thirty continental coordinates!"
"Alright," Austin said, exhaling slowly into his oxygen mask. "Let’s turn on the lights for the whole continent."
He threw the lever down.
*KA-THUNK.*
A low, resonant thrum vibrated through the 100,000-foot titanium spar as fifteen exawatts of thermonuclear energy were channeled from Austin’s binary core into the superconducting feed horn.
From the thirty-meter dish, thirty invisible, highly focused beams of coherent microwave energy shot downward through the blackness of orbital space.
Traveling at the speed of light, the beams pierced the upper stratosphere, punched through the high cirrus clouds, and struck the thirty massive rectenna receiver farms scattered across the four mortal empires.
Down below, the effect was instantaneous, breathtaking, and world-altering.
In the imperial capital of Great Yan, the central rectenna station—a three-mile circular grid of silver wire meshes erected outside the city’s southern gate—suddenly hummed with a pleasant, musical drone.
Massive step-down transformers hummed to life. High-voltage underground cables thrummed with pure, regulated 60-Hertz alternating current.
*CLICK. CLICK. BZZZZZZT.*
Across the two-hundred-square-mile metropolis, every home, shop, palace, and military garrison was suddenly flooded with bright, warm, flicker-free electric illumination. Street lamps along five thousand avenues flared like lines of captured stars.
Emperor Yan Ming stood upon the grand palace balcony, clutching his jade railing as he stared out at a city that was as bright as noon in the dead of midnight. Beside him, Grand Astrologer Sima Feng fell to his knees, pressing his face to the cold marble terrace.
"The night..." Emperor Yan Ming whispered, tears glistening in his eyes as he looked up into the black sky toward the single, steady silver star at the top of the Skyway. "The night has been abolished. No darkness can dwell where the Lord of the High Noon casts his gaze! Summon the Imperial Treasury! We shall replace every smoking coal brazier in the empire with the sacred glowing wire!"
In the Imperial Alchemical Guild of Great Yan, three hundred master pill-refiners were running through their workshops in ecstatic disbelief.
For three thousand years, the guild had relied on unpredictable charcoal stoves and volatile earth-fire vents, losing eighty percent of their heavenly longevity pills to sudden temperature spikes and toxic pill-soot contamination.
Now, wired into the municipal 220-volt grid, clean electric resistance induction coils wrapped around their alchemical cauldrons, maintaining temperatures true to 0.1 degrees Celsius with a digital thermostat dial.
"Look at the cauldron!" wept Chief Alchemist Mu, staring through his magnifying lens at a batch of Nine-Revolving Golden Core pills. "Zero carbon soot! Zero flame flicker! The medicinal essence is coalescing with one hundred percent purity! The Lord of the High Noon has turned alchemy into a standardized assembly line!"
In the southern provinces, three thousand textile mills, automated grain flour mills, and timber mills began to spin simultaneously.
Peasant cooperatives that had spent generations grinding grain with wooden hand querns watched in astonished weeping as 220-volt single-phase induction motors spun heavy millstones at eighteen hundred RPM, processing five hundred bushels of wheat in twenty minutes without a single drop of sweat spilled.
In the northern snow mountains, where winter traditionally froze thousands of poor villagers in their drafty huts, heated glycol floor loops began to hum beneath dirt floors. Homes warmed to a comfortable seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit, melting the ice from window sills and filling the mountain air with the scent of roasted tubers and simmering vegetable stew.
Across the entire continent, power blackouts ceased to exist.
Energy—the most precious, guarded commodity that ancient sects had slaughtered millions to hoard in the form of spirit stones—was suddenly as abundant, accessible, and cheap as rainwater falling from the sky.
Down at Sunset Peak’s Central Plaza, Li Xiaoyao sat in his newly expanded executive trading suite, dressed in a sharp black pinstripe vest with a yellow grease pencil tucked behind each ear.
Before him were twelve heavy drafting tables covered in telegraph tape and glowing spiritual scrying scrolls, staffed by thirty junior disciples who were furiously updating market exchange rates with brass chalk-holders.
"Great Yan Industrial Grid drawing two point four exawatts!" shouted an apprentice rigger from table three.
"Iron Pavilion Smelting District requesting an additional four hundred petawatts for Floor Two expansion!" called another from table seven.
"Heavenly Sword Sect requesting three hundred gigawatt-hours to power their mountain sword-forges!" shouted a third.
The Grand Elder of the Heavenly Sword Sect, who was standing before Xiaoyao’s desk holding a tray of five ancient, glowing flying swords, pleaded desperately: "Brother Xiaoyao! Take these five third-stage spirit swords as payment! Our sword-disciples are waiting in darkness!"
Li Xiaoyao didn't even look up from his leather-bound ledger. He tapped the desk with his grease pencil.
"Elder, we don't take swords. What am I going to do with five flying swords? Use them as letter openers?" Xiaoyao chuckled smoothly. "Standard wholesale rate: zero point zero four spirit stones per kilowatt-hour, settled daily in Sunset Peak Dungeon Vouchers. Furthermore, under Section 12 of our Time-of-Use Tariff, your peak-hour consumption between 17:00 and 21:00 carries a fifteen percent demand surcharge. If you can't pay in vouchers, we have a very nice work-release program where your disciples can sweep gravel on Floor Four."
The Grand Elder signed the voucher promissory note without uttering another word.
Li Xiaoyao leaned back in his leather chair, taking a sip of iced plum tea while stroking a small clay figurine of Austin wearing a hard hat.
"Master Chu gave us the fire of the stars," Xiaoyao chuckled to himself. "And we are turning it into the greatest municipal utility monopoly the nine heavens have ever witnessed."
High above, at the 100,000-foot summit spar, Austin was reviewing the incoming numbers on his aluminum clipboard.
`CONTINENTAL DEMAND: 8.42 EXAWATTS (56.1% OF CONTINUOUS RATING).` `GRID FREQUENCY STABILITY: 60.01 HZ.` `POWER FACTOR AVERAGE: 0.982 LEADING.` `SYSTEM LOSSES: 3.2% (WITHIN ACCEPTABLE MARGIN).` `MUNICIPAL GROSS REVENUE: 4,850,000 SPIRIT STONES DAILY.`
Austin clicked his ballpoint pen, thoroughly satisfied.
"Eighty-four percent capacity factor, sub-four-percent transmission losses, and sixty Hertz flat," Austin nodded, tapping the console with his grease pencil. "Now that is what I call a stable distribution network. No line sag, no tree branch shorts, and zero lightning outages."
He turned to Tie Kuang, who was wiping a tear of joy from his gold faceplate.
"Tie Kuang, how's the passenger hoist looking?"
Tie Kuang snapped to attention. "Master! The double-deck pressurized passenger cars have passed their five-hundred-ton load-drop tests! The magnetic eddy-current emergency brakes arrested the cab from two hundred miles per hour in forty feet with zero structural deformation! The redundant twelve-inch titanium cables are tensioned and certified!"
"Good," Austin said, glancing down the elevator shaft toward the clouds thirty kilometers below. "Inform Xiaoyao. He can open the ticket booth for high-altitude passenger operations."
"The Stratospheric Express is cleared for boarding."