Chapter 2: The Jade Emperor's Plumbing Problem

The cloud bridge collapsed three times before breakfast.

Liu Yang stood at the edge of the Eastern Sky Plaza, watching celestial workers scramble to catch falling pavilions. Golden tiles tumbled through the void, spinning like autumn leaves before disappearing into the mist below. Nobody seemed concerned.

"Third time this week," said a passing official, adjusting his hat. "The Emperor says it's bad qi flow."

Liu Yang pulled out his notebook. The numbers didn't lie. The bridge's load-bearing capacity had failed at exactly 2.3 times its rated stress. He'd calculated it during his first night in heaven, lying on a cloud that felt suspiciously like memory foam but smelled of incense and ozone.

"The problem isn't qi," he said.

The official stopped. "What?"

"Your beams are undersized. The distributed load exceeds the tensile strength of the celestial jade by forty percent." Liu Yang tapped his pencil against the notebook. "And your foundation is floating on compressed mist instead of solid bedrock."

The official stared at him like he'd spoken a foreign language. Which, technically, he had. The man's eyes were the color of amber, pupils shifting slowly like liquid gold. Immortal. Probably been alive since the Han Dynasty.

"You're the mortal," the official said. "The one who fell through the sky."

"Fell implies accident. I was pushed."

"By a bridge."

"Same thing."

Liu Yang had learned three things in his first twenty-four hours in the Heavenly Domain. One: the gods had no concept of structural engineering. Two: they solved every problem with more qi, which was like trying to fix a leaking pipe by turning up the water pressure. Three: the Jade Emperor had been trying to seal a leak in the Southern Qi Pipeline since the Tang Dynasty.

Eight hundred years.

Eight hundred years of the same leak, and nobody had thought to check if the pipe was cracked instead of just loosely connected.

The official, whose name turned out to be Feng Bo, led him through the Eastern Sky Plaza. The architecture was spectacular in the way only something built by beings with infinite time and zero budget could be. Pagodas stacked at precarious angles. Bridges that curved like silk ribbons. Stairs that led to platforms that led to more stairs that led to nowhere.

"Where are we going?" Liu Yang asked.

"The Emperor demands your presence."

"Why?"

Feng Bo's golden eyes flickered. "Because the Southern Qi Pipeline just exploded."

---

The Jade Emperor's throne room looked like someone had tried to build the Forbidden City inside a hurricane.

Columns of jade and gold spiraled upward into a ceiling that wasn't there. The walls were made of flowing water, or maybe light, or maybe both. At the center sat a man who looked exactly like every painting Liu Yang had ever seen—except for the expression on his face, which was the universal look of someone who'd been dealing with the same maintenance issue since before the printing press was invented.

"You're the engineer," the Emperor said. It wasn't a question.

"Yes."

"My ministers tell me you spoke heresy about our bridges."

"I told them their beams were undersized."

"And now my pipeline has exploded." The Emperor leaned forward. His robes rustled like thunder. "Coincidence?"

"Bad design isn't a coincidence. It's a pattern."

Someone gasped. Liu Yang didn't care. He'd spent his entire professional life watching people die because someone had cut corners on rebar spacing or used cheap concrete. Heaven wasn't different. It just had better special effects.

The Emperor's expression shifted. The divine anger faded into something that looked almost like curiosity.

"Show me."

---

The Southern Qi Pipeline ran through the heart of the Heavenly Domain.

Liu Yang had expected something impressive. Instead, he found a network of pipes that looked like they'd been assembled by someone who'd never seen a pipe before. Sections connected at random angles. Valves that didn't align with the flow direction. A pressure gauge that had been painted over with gold leaf.

"It's beautiful," he said.

The attending celestial engineer—a woman named Xian Li who'd been in charge of the pipeline for three centuries—puffed up with pride.

"Thank you. I painted the gauge myself."

"That's not a compliment."

Her face fell.

Liu Yang walked to the source of the explosion. The pipe had ruptured along a seam, sending qi bleeding into the void. The immortals had surrounded it with containment crystals, which were doing nothing because the pressure was still building behind the crack.

"Every three hundred years," Xian Li said, "the Emperor orders a new seal. I've applied seventeen seals myself."

"Seventeen."

"Yes."

"And you never thought to replace the pipe?"

"The pipe is celestial jade. It's eternal."

Liu Yang pulled out his calculator. The numbers took thirty seconds to run. He'd done the same math a thousand times on Earth, calculating stress points for bridges, dams, and high-rises. The physics didn't change just because the materials were magical.

"The pipe isn't cracked," he said. "It's fatigued."

"Impossible."

"Celestial jade is brittle under cyclic loading. Every time you seal the leak, the pressure builds until it splits the seam again. You've been putting bandaids on a broken bone." He pointed at the rupture. "The entire section needs to be replaced. And the new section needs expansion joints to handle thermal stress from qi flow."

Xian Li looked like he'd just suggested demolishing the Temple of Heaven. "That would take decades. The materials alone—"

"How long does it take to grow celestial jade?"

"Six months. Minimum."

"Then we start growing it today. In the meantime, I can design a temporary pressure relief system that will prevent further ruptures."

The crowd of celestial officials murmured. Liu Yang spotted Feng Bo in the back, watching with an expression that was impossible to read. The man's amber eyes reflected the glow of the leaking qi.

"You're proposing to redesign heaven," Feng Bo said.

"I'm proposing to fix your plumbing."

"The difference being?"

Liu Yang turned back to the pipeline. The qi was still bleeding into the void, staining the clouds with streaks of blue light. Beautiful, in its way. Deadly, if it kept building.

"The difference," he said, "is that I actually know what I'm doing."

---

The work began at midnight.

Heaven didn't have midnight, technically—the light never fully faded, just shifted to a softer gold—but Liu Yang had always worked best in the hours between dark and dawn. The celestial construction site was empty, the workers having retreated to their cloud-palaces for meditation or whatever immortals did when they weren't failing at basic engineering.

He laid out his plans on a sheet of jade-paper. The calculations were simple, once you understood the material properties. Celestial jade had a compressive strength of approximately 800 megapascals, which was better than concrete but worse than steel. Its tensile strength was abysmal. Whoever had designed the original pipeline had assumed the material was indestructible, which was the single most dangerous assumption in all of engineering.

"Working late."

Liu Yang didn't look up. He'd heard the footsteps—or rather, the lack of footsteps. Immortals moved like smoke.

"Someone has to."

Feng Bo stepped into the light. He'd shed his official robes for something simpler, a gray tunic that made him look almost mortal.

"The Emperor is impressed."

"He should be. I'm fixing an eight-hundred-year-old problem."

"The Emperor has been fixing it for eight hundred years."

"No. He's been failing to fix it for eight hundred years. There's a difference."

Feng Bo was silent for a long moment. Then he sat down on the cloud-floor, cross-legged, like he had all the time in the world. Which he did.

"Where did you come from, Liu Yang?"

"Earth."

"That's not what I mean."

Liu Yang looked up from his designs. Feng Bo's golden eyes were fixed on him, and there was something in them that hadn't been there before. Something sharp.

"I mean," Feng Bo said, "why you? The Heavens have received souls from Earth for millennia. Farmers. Warriors. Poets. Never an engineer."

"Maybe the universe finally got tired of watching you build things wrong."

Feng Bo smiled. It wasn't a friendly smile.

"We'll see how long you last."

---

The next morning, Liu Yang woke to find his designs had been stolen.

He searched his quarters—a modest cloud-chamber with a bed that floated six inches off the ground—but the jade-paper was gone. Every calculation, every drawing, every note he'd made about the pipeline's redesign.

Vanished.

He found Xian Li at the construction site, staring at the leaking pipe with an expression of deep satisfaction.

"Good news," she said. "The Emperor has ordered a new seal."

"What?"

She held up her hand. In her palm sat a fresh seal of celestial jade, perfectly carved, glowing with qi.

"The materials are ready. I'll have the rupture sealed by sunset."

Liu Yang's blood went cold. "That's a temporary fix. It'll fail again."

"The Emperor's orders."

"The Emperor doesn't understand the problem."

Xian Li's smile didn't waver. "The Emperor understands everything."

Liu Yang turned and ran.

---

The throne room was empty.

No guards. No ministers. Just the Jade Emperor, sitting on his throne, reading a scroll that glowed with golden characters.

"Your Majesty."

The Emperor didn't look up. "Liu Yang. I heard you were upset about the seal."

"Your engineers are going to make the problem worse."

"They've been solving it for centuries."

"No. They've been hiding it. Every time you seal a leak, you're building pressure somewhere else. The next rupture will be bigger. And the one after that. Until the entire pipeline fails."

The Emperor set down his scroll. His eyes were ancient. Tired.

"And what would you have me do?"

"Shut down the pipeline. Replace the damaged section. Install expansion joints. It'll take six months, but when it's done, the system will work."

"Six months without qi flow."

"Better than an explosion that destroys half the Eastern Sky."

The Emperor was silent. The golden light flickered around him, casting shadows that moved like living things.

"You're asking me to admit that my engineers have been wrong for eight centuries."

"I'm asking you to admit that they don't know what they're doing."

"And if I refuse?"

Liu Yang met his gaze. "Then you'll still have a leaking pipe in another eight hundred years."

The Emperor laughed. It was a hollow sound, like a bell cracking.

"Your designs were stolen."

"I know."

"I have them."

Liu Yang's heart stopped.

The Emperor reached into his sleeve and pulled out a roll of jade-paper. Liu Yang's notes. His calculations. His drawings.

"You're right," the Emperor said. "The pipeline is going to fail. I've known for four hundred years."

"Then why—"

"Because admitting the problem means admitting that heaven is not perfect." The Emperor's voice dropped to a whisper. "And if heaven is not perfect, then what is?"

The jade-paper glowed in his hands.

"I have a new project for you, Liu Yang."

"What kind of project?"

The Emperor smiled. It was the smile of a man who had been waiting a very long time for someone to ask the right question.

"The kind that will get you killed."