On the winter solstice of 1998, the night the bankruptcy notice went up at Fuyang Red Star Factory, spiritual qi revived.
The veteran workers left behind by the times discovered that every skill they had spent a lifetime mastering, filing, turning, welding, and forging, could draw in spiritual qi. Liu Tieshan, an eighth-grade fitter, smashed the first Rust Wraith with a single hammer blow. His son, Liu Weidong, who had just graduated from technical school, woke up able to hear machines talk.
The factory director plans to sell off the old factory for next to nothing, foreign conglomerates are eyeing the secret beneath its floor, and ancient cultivation families look down on anyone who learned by getting their hands dirty with a wrench. The father and son lead the factory's veteran workers, starting by stopping the sale and raising funds to reopen it. They turn the bankrupt old factory into the cultivation age's first spiritual machinery plant.
They write the masters' signature techniques into procedures anyone can learn, bringing workers from old factories across the country together. Craft is technique, and every process is cultivation. The people dismissed as relics of a bygone era will use their working hands to defend their factory and their city...
