Emergency suspension runes on the underside flared with a faint but steady blue light. Lifted by the forced anti-gravity array, the millions of tons of leaning rock and steel finally hit a violently precarious, yet mathematically stable, mechanical equilibrium.
The mountain’s countdown to total structural failure stopped.
“Cough... cough...”
With the massive spell finally spent, the last of Selena’s vitality seemed to vanish. She slumped limply against the icy console, her strength utterly gone， cold sweat soaking her shredded prison jumpsuit.
I waved a hand, signaling two bear-kin guards to haul her back to the custom glass enclosure we’d built for her.
“Alex! You need to see this! The lower city just went up in flames!” Zayla sprinted over like a black whirlwind, her face rigid. “It’s not a standard brawl. It’s a full-blown riot!”
We immediately hustled down to the temporary containment zone.
The scene was a boiling cesspool.
We had crammed thousands of Eagle-kin POWs hauled down from the floating island into the bottom of the gorge, right alongside the massive influx of wolf and bear-kin refugees Garza had left behind.
The massive beast-kin made the already stagnant air practically unbreathable. They spat on the dirt and roasted half-raw, gamey meat over oil drum fires.
Meanwhile, the Eagle-kin—used to cloud-filtered incense, obsessive hygiene, and massive superiority complexes—were losing their minds over the stench.
What started as trading insults about “unwashed animals” and “molting weaklings” rapidly escalated into a massive, bloody turf war.
Claws, rocks, and violently ripped white feathers flew through the air. Shredded tents caught fire. Screams echoed off the canyon walls.
Standing on an observation gantry a safe distance away, I rubbed my throbbing temples.
The system UI scrolled the latest census data in glaring red text:
Skyreach’s capacity was totally blown.
Pitching tents and slapping together cheap concrete blocks wasn't going to fix this. Skyreach V2.0—the vertical retrofit—had to break ground immediately.
It wasn't just a blueprint I’d used to leverage Selena; it was a hard survival requirement for the city.
...
Early the next morning, I called a top-level expansion briefing.
Present were Zayla, Brad, Sarak, Mykra, Elder Carl, and our treasurer, Lyn. I also had the guards drag Selena in.
Wearing her inhibitor collar and heavy handcuffs, she sat at the far end of the long table, keeping her eyes glued to the floor.
I booted up the holographic projector. Blue light rendered a massive, suffocatingly ambitious structure right in the middle of the table.
“This is the Skyreach V2.0 Vertical Master Plan.”
I pointed a red laser pen at the hologram.
“We’re done sprawling outward. We are connecting the bedrock, the surface, and the sky.”
“The bottom layer—the gorge and the mining sectors—will be designated The Furnace. It houses heavy industry, smelters, and the geothermal hubs.”
“At the peak, we level the deck of the floating island wreckage. That becomes Cloud Crown. It serves as our defense platform, advanced R&D, and future aerial port.”
“And suspended halfway up the mountain...”
I traced a massive ring around the center of the main load-bearing track.
“We construct The Hive—our central transit hub.”
“Once the concrete cures, the Eagle-kin and Cat-kin, who prefer altitude, take the upper residential zones. Wolf and Bear-kin take the lower zones.”
“Hold on.”
Zayla frowned, pointing at the suspended upper city model, instantly spotting the flaw. “You put the eagles and cats up top? And leave the wolves and bears down in the mud of the Furnace?”
She looked at me, her eyes carrying the heavy concern of a leader. “Builder, you’re using physical elevation to manufacture two different worlds. Give it a few decades, and the top turns into corrupt new nobles, while the bottom rots into a slum full of hatred. How is that any different from Selena’s Cloud Summit?”
I smiled. A genuine, relieved smile.
Zayla wasn't just an assassin looking for a target anymore. She was starting to analyze the structural load of society.
“I ran the math on that exact risk, Zayla. That’s why I built a physical trap right into the blueprint.”
Pointing at the lines representing the transit rails, I explained my Forced Traffic Convergence theory.
“I severed all express elevators between the upper and lower cities.”
Scanning their shocked faces, I continued. “In my schematics, zero elevators run straight from the bedrock to the peak. Every single person, going up or down, is forced to transfer at The Hive in the middle.”
“Furthermore, the bounty guild, the general hospital, the main commercial market, and the schools—all of it gets bolted securely into this central hub.”
Leaning both hands on the table, I looked around the room.
“What does that mean? It means if a senior tech from the clouds wants the freshest bread at the lowest price, he’s coming down to the Hub. And if a wolf-kin miner wants to burn his aluminum chits on a shot of rotgut, he’s heading up to meet him. They’ll breathe the same air, stand in the same line, and share the same floor.”
“Every single day, the daily commute of forty-seven thousand people gets physically bottlenecked right here. Even a formerly 'noble' storm mage will have to pack into the same elevator car as a grease-stained miner, breathe the same exhaust, and stand in the exact same line to buy meat.”
Dead silence.
I saw a spark of profound respect flash in Zayla’s eyes.
Over in the corner, Selena slowly raised her head. Her silver eyes studied me with an incredibly complex, heavy gaze.
“Your blueprint sounds beautiful, Alex.”
Selena finally spoke up. Her voice was raspy, but it still carried that specific, piercing mockery of a fallen god who saw the fatal flaw.
“But you seem to have forgotten the hazard beneath our boots. The slumbering dragon king.”
She pointed a chained finger at the floor.
“A vertical city. Great concept. But when that ancient dragon fully wakes up, even if it just rolls over in its sleep, it triggers a Space Quake. Your perfectly straight steel rod will snap like a stale breadstick.”
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
“When that happens, your dozens of elevators, your central hub, and your tens of thousands of 'equal' citizens will all smash into a fine paste.”
The briefing room went dead again.
The smile wiped off my face. The system on my retina unhelpfully flashed a glaring red equation:
[Projected Shear Stress > Current Reinforced Concrete Yield Strength by 400% = Guaranteed Structural Failure]
She just hit my fatal blind spot.
Rigid seismic resistance couldn't absorb the dual physical and spatial distortion generated by a creature that massive.
“So we pour the foundation ten times thicker? Or cast the whole thing in solid steel?” Brad scratched his bald head.
I shook my head. “Once you cross the physical yield limit, even the thickest armor plate shatters like glass.”
“Install ten thousand heavy-duty spring pistons!” Sarak jumped onto the table, waving his arms. “We bolt shock absorbers onto the whole damn city!”
I kept frowning. “Springs only dampen vertical kinetic transfer. They won't do squat against the lateral shear force and horizontal twisting of a dragon rolling over. The rails would snap.”
“Boss...”
Mykra suddenly spoke up, his voice low. Pointing at the holographic waveform simulating the 'Space Quake,' he murmured:
“Since it outputs a magical frequency vibration, sort of like the ripples in a shadow dive... instead of tanking the hit, could we generate an 'inverse waveform' to... trick the destructive energy away?”
Looking at Sarak’s pistons and processing Mykra’s 'inverse waveform,' a flashbang went off in my brain.
I thought about the skyscrapers back on Earth, the ones built right on top of fault lines and inside typhoon alleys. I thought of Taipei 101!
“Yes! Flexible resonance!”
I slammed my hand on the table, making everyone jump.
“I’ve got it! We don't brace against the impact! We built a Tuned Mass Damper (TMD)! We use a hyper-dense fluid sphere to eat the kinetic energy of the dragon’s seismic waves!”
I whipped my head around, locking eyes with Selena.
“Selena! The high-density liquid inert aether runoff you used to cool your massive arrays on the floating island—is that waste material still up there?!”
Selena blinked, momentarily overwhelmed by my industrial fanaticism. She answered instinctively:
“It’s still there... stored in lead canisters. Because of its extreme density and volatile nature, we had no way to neutralize it. We just let the stockpile sit.”
“Perfect!”
“Sarak! Cast one hundred hollow steel spheres, five meters in diameter, weighing a hundred tons each! We’ll suspend them on universal joints at the structural connections between the sky-rails and the mountain!”
“Mykra! Take a team of mages and pump that hyper-dense fluid waste into the steel spheres! Lock them down with dual electromagnetic and magical containment!”
“When the dragon rolls over down below, the seismic wave will twist the mountain to the left. But those massive aether-steel spheres will swing to the right due to their extreme inertia! The counter-momentum will perfectly cancel out the destructive force of the quake!”
Right in front of them, I grabbed a pen, a rubber band, and a heavy iron nut to rig a makeshift pendulum on the table.
When I violently shook the base of the pen, the heavy nut swung in the opposite direction. The top of the pen remained shockingly stable—not even a drop of condensation on the plastic shook loose.
I watched Selena swallow hard. Staring at that crude little model demonstrating an absolute law of physics, she completely shut her mouth.
Skyreach V2.0 construction kicked off at full throttle.
In just a few days, fueled by heavy machinery, storm mages, and round-the-clock labor shifts, the foundation pit for the main anchor of The Hive hit a depth of nearly fifty meters.
But then, we hit a snag.
That afternoon, while I was running through lower city security patrols with Zayla, Sarak sprinted into the room, covered head-to-toe in black sludge.
“Boss! Get down to the bottom level! Something’s wrong in the main anchor pit!”
Sarak’s voice cracked from sheer panic. “Our high-pressure steam drills are completely shattered! We... we dug straight down to the hatch of hell!”
My stomach dropped. I bolted out of my chair, grabbing Zayla and Brad as we rushed toward the center of the excavation site.
Riding the crude cargo elevator to the bottom of the pit, we were hit by a wall of scalding steam and localized panic.
The specialized tungsten-steel bits on several massive pneumatic pile drivers were completely blunted and shattered. Twisted metal shrapnel littered the dirt.
Pushing through the crowd of workers, I laid eyes on the bottom of the pit.
Embedded in the ancient, pitch-black granite of the wasteland was an exposed, massive flat metal surface, roughly ten meters in diameter.
It completely clashed with the magic and crude steampunk aesthetic of this world.
It was a silver-gray superalloy, reflecting the torchlight with a cold, mirror-like finish. There wasn't a single magical rune etched into it. Zero mana signature.
What it did have were physically perfect chamfered edges forged by ultra-high technology, and a geometric seam so tight a water molecule couldn't squeeze through.
“Boss, look at this...”
Sarak shivered, walking to the edge of the metal plate and pointing at an indentation that looked like a console interface.
“Do you remember... a few years back, when we were laying the foundation in the Sector C Death Corridor... we dug up that weird metal fragment?”
My lungs stalled for a second. My heart started hammering against my ribs.
“Hurry! Go get that fragment from storage!”
A few minutes later, Sarak hustled back with the chunk of metal.
Under the shocked stares of the crew, I crouched down. I lined up the fragment’s strange, irregular protrusions with the gap on the console surface, and slowly pressed it in.
A perfect fit.
A crisp, purely mechanical lock engaging.
The metal surface booted up with a faint phosphor glow, revealing a line of familiar English text:
[ ... PROJ: E.D.E.N - Sec.04 / MASS DAMPING BUNKER ... ]
The blue UI interface in my head—the one that usually just fed me blueprints and material diagnostics—went absolutely critical, flashing as it had just taken a nuclear strike!
Right on cue, the UI on my retinas went critical, spamming my vision with glaring red warnings:
The alloy hatch didn't budge a single millimeter.
Grinding my teeth, I cursed under my breath. “Dammit.”
Brad cracked his knuckles. “Want me to go haul down some high explosives and see if we can knock?”
Standing right beside me, Zayla suddenly let out a tight, pained grunt.
She clamped a hand over her chest—specifically, over the necklace hidden under her collar. Right then, bleeding through the fabric of her shirt, a deep blue light pulsed with a steady, rhythmic frequency.
I stared hard at the glowing outline against her chest, my brain suddenly shifting into overdrive. “Zayla,” I said, a completely insane calculation clicking into place. “That key around your neck... hand it to me.”
Without a second of hesitation, she yanked the cord over her head and pressed the bizarre piece of metal into my palm. It was still warm from her skin.
I turned back to the hatch, my eyes locking onto a hairline, recessed slot I had completely overlooked.
Taking a deep breath of the stagnant air, I took the “holy relic” the Cat-kin had bled to protect for two thousand years, and slowly slid it into the groove.
BEEEEEP.
A crisp, sustained electronic tone sliced right through the dead silence of the pit.
But this time, the glaring red text gave a bizarre flicker.
Then, the red washed out. The interface shifted into a deep, calm, and absolutely authoritative cobalt blue:
HISSSSS!!!
The teeth-grinding groan of heavy hydraulics kicked in.
There wasn't a single wavelength of magic in that noise. Just the pure, unadulterated sound of mechanical gears and pneumatic pressure venting.
Driven by thousands of tons of concealed hydraulic force, the alloy floor—the thing the beast-kin thought was the 'hatch of hell'—slowly slid apart.
A blast of cold, bone-dry air, carrying the faint metallic tang of oxidation from untold centuries of isolation, rushed up from the abyss and hit my face.
Torchlight spilled into the subterranean shaft.
It was an incredibly deep, spiraling industrial steel staircase. Bolted to the walls were the dried-out, oxidized husks of fluorescent emergency indicator lights.
The bottom of the stairs vanished into absolute darkness, pointing straight down thousands of meters into the crust—right toward the slumbering ancient dragon king.
The surrounding wolf and eagle-kin laborers were so terrified they dropped straight to their knees, praying for divine forgiveness.
Zayla drew her twin blades, treating the hole like a lethal threat. Her amber pupils shrank against the darkness. She had never seen a 'steel tomb' like this—devoid of magic, yet somehow commanding more awe and dread than a divine ruin.
Standing at the edge of the abyss, my blood ran in reverse.
Project E.D.E.N.
Mass Damping Bunker.
This wasn't some parallel fantasy world of swords and sorcery!
This Blackrock Mountain range, this entire so-called continent of Valsaria... it was highly probable that it was the wreckage of a crashed generation ship, or a colossal fallout shelter built by our Earth ancestors!
“Boss... should we weld it shut? This is way too cursed.” Sarak swallowed hard.
In that moment, my curiosity and absolute thirst for the truth completely overpowered my fear of the subterranean dragon.
Down there might be the ultimate countermeasure against that ancient beast. Down there lay the truth of why this world had turned into a wasteland.
“No.”
I turned my head, looking back at Brad and Zayla. The spark of a true explorer burned in my eyes.
“You guys have the guts to come down and take a look with me?”