​The Smithing Hall smelled of burnt fur and high-voltage ozone. ​Su Qing covered her eyes, peering through her fingers. Little Mo was vomiting quietly in a bucket in the corner. ​On the stone slab, the one-eyed spirit wolf was strapped down with iron chains. It wasn't dead. It was... being reconfigured. ​Lin Jin stood over the beast. His chest cavity was open, the heat from his internal forge radiating outward like a blast furnace. He held a red-hot iron rib in one hand and a spool of copper wire in the other. ​"Stop squirming," Lin Jin told the wolf. " anesthesia is expensive. I'm using the manual override." ​He jammed a needle into the wolf’s spine. THWACK. The wolf went rigid. Its eyes rolled back. ​"Nerve block," Lin Jin explained to his terrified audience. "Now, observe. The problem with biological units is fragility. Bones break. Muscle tears. But steel..." ​He picked up the mechanism from the broken ballista Little Mo had scavenged. It was a heavy, rusted spring-loader

The device on the workbench didn't look like a sword. It looked like a brick that had mated with a stovepipe. It was ugly. Heavy. Blocky. The barrel was bored from a solid bar of Deep-Sea Iron. The receiver was a welded box of scrap metal. The grip was wrapped in rough leather. There was no elegance, no flowing lines, no spiritual inscriptions. Su Qing held it with trembling hands. It weighed twenty pounds. "Elder Furnace," she asked, struggling to keep the muzzle up. "How do I swing this?" "You don't swing it," Lin Jin adjusted a screw on the side of the weapon. His optical sensors were zoomed in on the firing pin—a modified chisel driven by a high-tension spring. "You point." Little Mo was busy in the corner, wearing a mask. She was grinding Corpse-Explosion Stones into a fine powder, mixing it with crushed charcoal and sulfur. The propellant. It wasn't black powder. It was "Angry Dirt." It burned with a green flash and expanded with enough force to crack stone. "Physics L

The White Bone Boat didn't look like a boat anymore. It looked like a castle that had been armored for a riot. The elegant, bleached-white ribs of the hull were gone, covered in jagged plates of black Deep-Sea Iron. The ghostly sails were ripped down. In their place, a forest of exhaust pipes jutted into the sky like organ pipes. Lin Jin stood in the newly carved "Engine Room"—formerly the cargo hold where the White Bone Sect kept their slaves. It was hot. Noisy. Filled with the smell of burning sulfur. "Physics Lesson 236," Lin Jin wiped grease onto his metal chest. "Internal Combustion." In front of him sat the monster he had built over the last week. It wasn't a formation. It wasn't a talisman. It was an engine. A V8 Spirit-Combustion Engine. The cylinders were cast from melted cauldrons. The pistons were carved from the femurs of a Tier-3 Stone Ape. The fuel lines were copper veins harvested from high-level zombies. "Elder Furnace," Su Qing shouted over the noise of the

Gravity in the Star-Fall Abyss was merely a suggestion. The Dreadnought rumbled forward, its iron treads chewing up a path of floating rocks. Sometimes the ship was horizontal. Sometimes it was vertical. Su Qing gripped the bone wheel, her face pale as she navigated a spiral of shattered islands that defied up and down. Lin Jin sat on the prow, welding a loose plate. His zombie legs were rotting faster. The high-altitude radiation and the stress of the V8 engine’s vibrations were turning the meat into sludge. "Inefficient," Lin Jin muttered, kicking a piece of his own falling shinbone off the deck. "I am leaking fluid. It is unprofessional." Zero sat next to him, dangling her legs over the abyss. Her three pet spiders—Stab, Poke, and Ouch—were knitting a web in the corner to catch stray lightning bugs. "Papa," Zero pointed into the purple fog. "Big man." Lin Jin looked up. His sensors recalibrated for scale. It wasn't a mountain range ahead. It was a Ribcage. They were ente

The Dreadnought limped into a canyon of jagged obsidian, dragging the reactor core behind it like a ball and chain. Su Qing cut the engines. CHUG-CHUG-Hiss. The V8 Spirit-Combustion Engine died. Silence returned to the Abyss, broken only by the crackle of purple lightning and the low, dangerous hum of the reactor sitting in the dust. Lin Jin dragged himself to the loading ramp. He was currently a torso mounted on a dolly. Little Mo was pushing him. "This is undignified," Lin Jin muttered. "I am a Warlord. I am a Terror. I am being pushed like a sack of potatoes." "We ran out of spare zombie legs, Elder," Little Mo panted. "And the Titan ate your big ones." They stopped in front of the reactor. It was cooling, but it was still hot enough to vitrify the sand around it. The casing was cracked, revealing the pulsing blue plasma inside. It was the heart of a starship. A Micro-Fusion Core. Capable of powering a city for a hundred years. "Zero," Lin Jin asked the girl sitting on