Blackstone City, next morning.
The side gate of the judicial yard sighed open like a dying breath.
Li stepped out into grey half-light. The sky sagged low, heavy with coal smoke. Air tasted of dry grit blown in from the Great Wastes: harsh, but better than the grave-stink of the cells.
A plain black carriage waited at the curb. No crest.
Isolde pulled the curtain aside. Face corpse-pale, eyes ringed violet from no sleep.
"Get in."
He climbed. Cracked ribs barked. He didn't flinch. The black nylon backpack: returned by the gaoler: was clutched like a lifeline.
"That cost me five hundred crowns," Isolde said, voice sharp over the rattle of wheels on stone. "Last liquid cash the company had. We're broke, in debt, and out of bread money."
"Bread will come," Li answered, eyes closed, fingers drumming silent calculations on his knee.
She stared. "Planning your escape back to whatever hell spat you out?"
He opened his eyes. Looked past her at the muddy streets and ragged beggars.
"Can't go back."
Flat. A law of physics.
He'd run the numbers last night in the dark.
The blast that dropped him here released at least twenty gigajoules.
This world couldn't even burn coal properly. Energy density too low.
To punch a hole home he needed grid power, pressure vessels, particle accelerators.
In short: he had to rebuild the entire industrial stack from scratch.
"To get home," he said, meeting her gaze, "I have to turn this world upside down."
"Madman," she muttered, but something hungry flickered behind the exhaustion.
Outskirts. Ruins of the Gilded Hand forge.
Charred beams stabbed the earth like broken ribs. Shattered firebrick lay everywhere, red as old blood.
Rain started: cold needles.
Li jumped down into ankle-deep mud and walked straight to the crater heart. Picked up a chunk of failed refractory: porous, bloated trash.
"How exactly do you make your 'white gold' here?" Isolde followed under a black umbrella, skirts hiked. "There's not even a furnace left."
"Not porcelain." He tossed the brick away.
She stopped dead. Umbrella tilted, rain slashing her face. Green eyes blazed.
"You lied to me? You promised riches! If not porcelain, what pays my debts?"
"Calm down."
He straightened, looking down at her fury.
"Porcelain needs ore selection, washing, aging. Two months minimum. Will your creditors wait sixty days?"
She froze. Rain soaked her hem.
No. Tomorrow was her deadline.
"Then what?" she snarled.
"Glass."
He pointed to a heap of pale quartz sand in the corner.
"Not your green bubbly garbage. Crystal glass. Perfectly clear. Like frozen water."
He unzipped the battered handbook, pages swollen but intact. The alien squares and precise diagrams hit her like a foreign language made of authority.
"Five masons. Ten laborers. Now."
She bristled. "I'm still the owner here."
Li's mouth curved: small, sardonic.
"You're the owner of tomorrow's corpse.
I'm the only reason you'll see sunset."
He pointed at the ruin.
"And because I'm right."
Two hours later the ruin was a war zone.
"STOP!"
Li's roar cut through the rain.
He strode to a mason, kicked over a freshly laid wall. Mud exploded.
The mason sprawled, terrified. "M'lord, I followed the old way—"
"There is no old way here."
Li jabbed a finger at the bricks.
"Staggered bonds. My spec. Do it."
The man scrambled to obey. No one argued twice.
Li stood in the downpour, ribs screaming, rain ice-cold, but heat surged in his veins like never before.
Back home, kicking down shoddy work got you suspended, docked, forced to drink apologies at the client's table: "Engineer Li, learn to be a person."
He'd swallowed it for years. Signed bad drawings. Smiled at idiots.
Here?
No safety bureau. No politics. No guanxi.
Truth was authority.
As long as he held the formula and the blueprint, he was god.
"How does it feel?" Isolde asked quietly, joining him under the partial roof.
He shook mud from his hands.
"Efficient."
He nodded toward the strange, low, turtle-shell dome rising from the wreckage: a reverberatory furnace.
"Light it."
Torches touched coal. Bellows groaned. The beast woke roaring.
Inside the arch, fire climbed from sullen orange to searing yellow to a white that hurt the soul.
Fourteen hundred degrees.
Li stood shirtless before the glare, sweat carving pale rivers through soot. Bandages around his ribs turned charcoal.
He stirred the crucible with a rod already cherry-red.
"More air. Full blast."
A smith screamed the walls would burst.
"They won't," Li said, voice ice in the heatstorm. "I ran the statics."
The dome glowed like a captive sun.
Sand, soda ash, lime melted, merged, became liquid light.
Li's eyes reflected molten glass like twin forges.
Isolde stood at his shoulder, trembling with something that wasn't cold.
Four hours later the annealing kiln cracked open.
He lifted out the impossible.
A goblet.
Perfectly clear.
So clear it was nearly invisible against the black velvet Isolde had ready. Only the rim's halo of rainbows proved it existed.
She touched it with one shaking finger. Cool. Real.
Not the piss-green trash sold in markets. This was captured starlight.
"Cost?" she whispered.
"Five coppers, once we scale."
Her pupils blew wide: predator recognizing predator.
"We do not sell this as glass," she said slowly. "We sell it as miracle."
Li shrugged. Marketing was her domain.
"Get it into the hands of the men who want to own you," he said. "Make them bleed gold."
Her smile was slow, sharp, beautiful.
He looked past the furnace to the distant spires of Blackstone.
"And start buying sulfur. Lots of sulfur. And saltpeter."
"What for?"
"Insurance."
He patted the nylon backpack.
Glass bought gold.
Gold bought time.
Time bought the next revolution.
The rain hissed on the glowing dome.
For the first time in centuries, the sky over Blackstone felt lighter.
Because something new had been born in the ashes.
And it was hungry.