[HOST INTEGRITY: 7%]
[LOCATION: IRON STREET - THE GRID]
[TIME: 5:22 PM]
The temperature in the basement was rising by one degree every ten seconds.
The Smithing Guild Overseer was sweating grease. His red skin glistened under the flickering fluorescent lights.
Behind him, the massive cooling vents were silent. The silence was heavier than the noise had been.
On the wall monitors, the warning text had shifted from yellow to red.
[CORE TEMP: 800°C]
[CRITICAL FAILURE IN: 90 SECONDS]
[ESTIMATED ASSET LOSS: 500,000 COINS]
Ren checked his watch.
"You are wasting time," Ren said, his voice cutting through the heat. "The copper wiring in your walls melts at 1,085 degrees. But the sensitive formations on those plates? They degrade at 850. You have about forty seconds before your inventory turns into expensive paperweights."
The Overseer gripped his lightning whip, his knuckles white.
"This is extortion!" he roared. "You can't just shut down a Guild factory!"
"I didn't shut it down," Ren corrected calmly. "My subcontractor, Mr. Lu, initiated an emergency maintenance cycle. It is standard procedure when safety violations are detected."
Ren slid the napkin forward like a death sentence.
"Sign the Emergency Asset Lease. I commandeer the Lu Unit for three shifts. You regain your air supply. And I will pay a Distress Premium—12% above their current debt service."
The Overseer looked at the screen. 840°C.
He looked at the terrified workers.
He looked at Ren, who looked ready to let the whole building burn down just to prove a point.
"Fine!" the Overseer screamed. "Take them! But if they aren't back in three days, I own your soul, boy!"
He grabbed the napkin and slammed his thumbprint onto it. A magical seal formed instantly.
[CONTRACT ACCEPTED: TEMPORARY LABOR LEASE]
Ren nodded to Lu Wei.
"Turn it back on."
Lu Wei scrambled under the desk and pulled the lever.
THOOM.
The fans roared to life. Cool air blasted into the room, swirling with dust. The temperature gauge began to drop.
Ren didn't stay to chat.
"Pack your tools," Ren ordered the stunned engineers. "We are leaving. And bring all the low-grade copper you can carry."
The Pivot
[LOCATION: LAST STOP FACTORY - ASSEMBLY FLOOR]
[TIME: 6:30 PM]
The arrival of the Lu Clan engineers was a culture shock.
They were used to a clean, silent, terrifying sweatshop.
Last Stop Factory was chaos.
Ogre bouncers (The Iron Fist Gang) were carrying crates. Ghosts were floating through walls. The air smelled of rust and old blood.
"This place..." Lu Wei whispered, clutching his toolbox. "It has terrible Feng Shui."
"It has terrible overhead," Ren corrected, limping toward the main production line. "But excellent tax benefits."
He stopped in front of the empty conveyor belt.
Lian and Jian were waiting. They looked at the twenty exhausted engineers Ren had brought in.
"Boss," Jian whispered. "These guys look like they're about to collapse. And we still don't have herbs. What are they going to do? Build us a garden?"
"No," Ren said. "They are going to build a Metabolic Converter."
Ren turned to Lu Wei.
"Old Lu. In the Smithing Guild, you carve formations to channel heat, correct?"
"Yes," Lu Wei nodded nervously. "Standard thermal loops."
"If you reverse the polarity of a thermal loop and feed it raw spiritual waste," Ren asked, "what do you get?"
Lu Wei blinked. He adjusted his cracked glasses.
"Reverse it? That would create a suction vortex. It would break down the matter into base particles. It's useless. It creates sludge."
"It creates Base Sludge," Ren agreed. "Pure, unformatted spiritual energy."
Ren picked up a handful of 'Ghost-Dust'—the useless grey byproduct that piled up in the corners of the factory.
"They have monopolized the Harvest."
Ren let the grey dust sift through his fingers like sand.
"But they do not control the Synthesis."
Ren looked at the engineers.
"I want you to reconfigure the main furnace. Instead of burning herbs to release scent, I want to burn garbage to release energy. Then, I want you to carve a Structure Array at the output nozzle."
Lu Wei's jaw dropped.
"You... you want to 3D print the incense? Using waste dust?"
"It's impossible," another engineer spoke up. "Synthetic incense is unstable. It dissolves in seconds. It has no binder."
"That is because you are using modern binding runes," Ren said. "You use the 'Iron-Lock' character. It's too rigid."
Ren grabbed a piece of chalk and drew a complex symbol on the floor. It looked like a spiderweb made of knives.
"Use the 'Soul-Stitch' character from the 4th Dynasty."
The engineers stared at the symbol.
"I've never seen that syntax," Lu Wei whispered. "It... it looks like it hurts just to look at."
"It does," Ren said. "It forces the energy to bind at a molecular level. It's painful for the energy, but stable for the product."
Ren clapped his hands.
"You have 72 hours before the Overseer wants you back. If we don't have a working prototype by dawn, we are all bankrupt. Get to work."
The Frankenstein Machine
The next six hours were a blur of sparks, shouting, and frantic scribbling.
Ren didn't sit down. He couldn't. His leg was burning, but he paced the floor, correcting angles, redrawing runes, and acting as a living instruction manual.
Lu Wei was a genius who had been forced to be an idiot for ten years.
Under Ren's direction, the old man woke up.
He ripped the safety limiters off the furnace. He wired copper plates in parallel sequences that shouldn't have been possible. He yelled at Red Dog to hold components in place while he welded them with qi-fire.
At 3:00 AM, the machine was ready.
It was ugly.
It looked like a jet engine mated with a distillery, covered in glowing copper scars.
"Hopper full!" Red Dog shouted from the top of the machine. He dumped a crate of grey factory dust and floor sweepings into the funnel.
"Ignition!" Lu Wei commanded.
WHIRRR-THUNK.
The furnace groaned. Green light pulsed through the copper veins. The 'Soul-Stitch' array flared to life, glowing a sickly, radioactive violet.
A hiss of steam.
Then, from the output nozzle, a long, thin grey stick was extruded.
It wasn't dried grass. It was perfectly smooth, uniform, and cold.
Jian grabbed it with tongs.
"It's... solid," Jian said. "It's not crumbling."
"Light it," Ren ordered.
Jian held a lighter to the tip.
Fwissh.
A thin stream of smoke rose. It didn't smell like flowers or herbs.
It smelled of static discharge and damp ash.
A starving worker ghost drifted closer, sniffing the air.
The ghost's eyes rolled back.
"Oh..." the ghost moaned. "That hits the spot. It feels... heavy."
"It works," Lian gasped. "It's feeding them."
Ren picked up a stick of the synthetic incense. He examined it with [Contract Sight].
[ITEM: SYNTHETIC INCENSE (PROTOTYPE)]
[GRADE: INDUSTRIAL]
[EFFECT: RAPID HUNGER SUPPRESSION]
[SIDE EFFECT: MILD EMOTIONAL NUMBNESS]
Ren smiled.
"It is soulless," Ren murmured, admiring the grey stick. "It is sterile. It is hollow. And the profit margin is infinite because we are monetizing industrial waste."
He turned to the team.
"Pack it. Brand it 'The Grey Line'. Sell it for half the price of the cheapest Nether-Core stick."
"We aren't just breaking the blockade," Ren said, looking at the ugly machine.
"We are crashing the market."
[SYSTEM ALERT]
[TECHNOLOGY UNLOCKED: SPIRITUAL SYNTHESIS]
[MARKET DISRUPTION: IMMINENT]
[HOST INTEGRITY: 6%]
(Warning: Rest Required)