The Iron-Corpse Sect had become the largest recycling plant in the cultivation world. Piles of broken flying swords, cracked shields, and shattered golems rose like mountains in the East Valley. The Heavenly Sword Alliance had dumped tons of "spiritual waste" here as payment. To them, a sword that had lost its Spirit (Qi) was garbage. To Lin Jin, it was High-Carbon Steel. "Physics Lesson 262," Lin Jin stood over a conveyor belt of broken jade tokens. "Material Science." He picked up a shattered shield. It was made of Cold-Iron, infused with frost essence. "The Qi is gone," Lin Jin observed, his blue optical sensors zooming in on the molecular structure. "But the lattice remains. It’s cryogenically treated metal." He tossed it into the Crucible. HISS. The metal melted, but it didn't lose its cold property. "Su Qing," Lin Jin ordered. "Cast this into engine blocks. We need heat sinks for the Railgun." Su Qing, now wearing a hard hat over her cultivator robes, nodded. "Yes, Fa

The Iron-Corpse Sect no longer looked like a sect. It looked like a refinery wrapped in a giant spiderweb. Thick, transparent pipes made of reinforced Spirit-Glass snaked across the mountains. They ran from the Central Warehouse (the main hall) to the outer perimeter, to the mining camps, and even underground to the secret bunkers. Inside these pipes, metal capsules shot back and forth at 300 miles per hour. THWOOMP. THWOOMP. Zero stood at the Dispatch Console (a bunch of levers she had decorated with stickers). She wore a headset that was buzzing with orders. "Order 882: Exploding Arrows! Sector 4!" "Order 883: Spare Leg! Sector 7!" "Order 884: Sandwich! Sector 1!" She grabbed a capsule. She stuffed a sandwich inside. She slammed it into the pneumatic tube. She pulled the lever. HISS-BANG. Compressed air from the main reactor kicked the capsule. It vanished in a blur. "Delivery time: 12 seconds!" Zero cheered. ... Field Test. Five miles away, in the Black-Mist Forest.

The Iron-Corpse Sect was loud. The Smithing Hall was loud. Even the Terminal One airfield was loud. But inside the Mag-Lev Tunnel, there was silence. A single, silver rail stretched into the darkness. It was made of Deep-Sea Iron, infused with the Cryo-Crystals harvested from the Ice-Heart Sect. It was cold. So cold that the air around it froze into liquid nitrogen fog. Superconductivity. Zero electrical resistance. Zero friction. Lin Jin stood next to the beast on the track. It wasn't a train in the traditional sense. It had no wheels. It had no smokestack. It was a sleek, silver projectile. Aerodynamic, pointed like a needle, and smooth as a mirror. [The Silver Bullet]. Su Qing walked around it, tapping the hull. "Elder Furnace," she whispered. "It floats." The fifty-ton train hovered three inches above the rail. "Magnetic Levitation," Lin Jin explained. "Physics Lesson 267." "Meissner Effect." "The superconducting rail expels the magnetic field," Lin Jin pointed to t

The Hangar was the tallest building in the Iron-Corpse Sect. It used to be the Ancestral Shrine, but Lin Jin had knocked down the ceiling to make room for Project Titan. Su Qing stood on a catwalk thirty feet in the air, looking down at the monster. It wasn't a zombie. It wasn't a tank. It was a Bipedal Weapons Platform. [Model: XM-1 "Titan" (Industrial Type)] [Height: 20 Feet] [Weight: 60 Tons] [Armor: Composite Deep-Sea Iron & Ceramic Plate] It looked like a knight, if the knight was built by a shipyard. Massive, blocky shoulders. Hydraulic pistons thick as tree trunks exposed at the joints. The head was a squat, sensor-studded dome buried deep in the chest armor to protect it from snipers. It was painted matte black, with yellow hazard stripes on the shoulders and knees. "It's... terrifying," Little Mo whispered, holding a wrench. "It looks like it eats mountains." "It eats Spirit Stones," Lin Jin’s voice came from the floor. He was currently disconnected. His torso la

The Myriad Beast Forest was no longer silent. The birds had stopped singing, and the apex predators had fled. In their place was a three-hundred-meter scar of scorched earth and splintered ancient wood. At the end of the trench lay the XM-1 Titan, buried waist-deep in a swampy crater. Steam hissed from its cracked ceramic plates, smelling of overheated coolant and burnt ozone. Lin Jin sat in the mud outside the open cockpit, his single remaining mechanical arm sparking. One of his optical sensors was shattered, leaving him with a cracked, red-tinted view of the world. "System status," Lin Jin croaked. [Hull Integrity: 32%.] [Reactor: Stable at 4% Output.] [Legs: Structural Failure.] [Payload: Lost.] "Papa, look," Zero pointed to the sky. The red light of evening was being cut by streaks of gold. They weren't stars. They were Sword-Cultivators. The shockwave of the Titan’s re-entry had been seen for five hundred miles. Every greedy sect in the region was racing to the crash si