The Imperial inspection tour was unannounced. There was no grand procession, no legion of officials, no unfurling of yellow banners. One moment the Tianjin Arsenal was a churning hive of industry, the next, the Emperor was simply there, walking through the main foundry as if on a casual afternoon stroll. He was accompanied only by the towering, silent form of Meng Tian and by the Viceroy of Zhili, Li Hongzhang, who had been summoned an hour earlier and was still struggling to comprehend the sheer audacity of an Emperor making a surprise visit to such a place.
Workers, their faces slick with sweat and grime, froze in shock before remembering themselves and falling into hasty, clumsy bows. The deafening symphony of steam hammers, grinding wheels, and roaring furnaces faltered for a moment before a foreman, his face pale with panic, ran alongside the imperial party, screaming at the men to get back to work.
Li Hongzhang had to shout to be heard over the din, his voice beaming with a proprietary pride that even the chaos couldn't diminish. "Your Majesty! As you commanded, production has been doubled! Our furnaces now run day and night! We are casting two hundred artillery shells per day, and the new production line for the Hanyang rifle"—he pointed toward a long, noisy building—"is assembling over one hundred and twenty units daily! The army of the Great Qing is being reborn in this very place!"
Qin Shi Huang's expression remained neutral, his gaze sweeping over the frenetic activity with an unnerving calm. "It is a start, Minister Li," he said, his young voice cutting through the noise with surprising clarity. "But the German factories produce rifles by the thousand each day. The British arsenals cast shells by the ten thousand. Quantity has a quality all its own. What is the bottleneck? Where is the friction in our machine?"
Li Hongzhang's proud smile faltered slightly. He had expected praise, not a demand for greater efficiency. "Steel, Your Majesty," he admitted, his voice lowering. "The primary bottleneck is the quality of the steel. Our iron ore from the Daye mines is abundant, but it is high in phosphorus, which makes the finished steel brittle. It is acceptable for rifle barrels and bayonets, but for the large-caliber naval guns and, most importantly, the armor plates for our new cruisers… the process is agonizingly slow and unreliable. We have a new Bessemer converter, a marvel of German engineering, but their own engineers are still struggling to perfect the process with our unique ore."
"Show me," the Emperor commanded.
Li Hongzhang led the small party toward the newest and largest building in the complex. Inside, the heat was a physical blow. A massive, pear-shaped furnace, two stories tall, dominated the space, roaring with contained power and periodically spitting a geyser of sparks and orange flame toward the smoke-blackened ceiling. A harried-looking German in a sweat-stained shirt, a man named Schmidt, was engaged in a loud, animated argument with a Chinese foreman, pointing emphatically at a set of pressure gauges.
"Your Majesty," Li Hongzhang said, raising his voice. "This is Herr Gunther Schmidt, the chief engineer on loan to us from the Krupp Ironworks."
Schmidt, seeing the Viceroy, turned from his argument, his face red with frustration. He froze when he saw who stood beside Li Hongzhang, his eyes widening at the sight of the boy Emperor in such a place. He executed a stiff, awkward bow. "Your… Your Majesty," he stammered in heavily accented Chinese. "Forgive the state of the workshop. We have… technical difficulties. The molten iron, it does not reach consistent purity. Too much phosphorus, as the Viceroy has said. It resists the burn. We waste one of every three pours. It is… infuriating."
QSH ignored the apology and the explanation. He simply said, "Let me see."
He walked forward, directly toward the roaring furnace, his simple silk robes seeming to ripple in the intense waves of heat. He moved with a purpose that made Li Hongzhang and Meng Tian exchange a nervous glance, but they followed. The German engineer and the foreman trailed behind, utterly baffled. The Emperor stopped a mere twenty feet from the converter, a proximity that forced the others to shield their faces from the searing heat. He, however, seemed untroubled by it.
"Silence," he commanded. The foreman immediately began shouting at the nearby workers to halt their machinery. Within a minute, the cacophony of the foundry was replaced by the singular, overwhelming roar of the Bessemer converter. The Emperor stood before it, closed his eyes, and simply stood still.
Li Hongzhang was mystified. "What is he doing?" he whispered to Meng Tian.
Meng Tian's reply was a low murmur. "Observing."
It was the truth, but not in any way Li Hongzhang could possibly comprehend. For QSH, the roaring furnace was not just a wall of heat and noise. With his eyes closed, his refined, supernatural senses reached out, passing through the thick steel walls of the converter as if they were paper. He was not seeing the molten metal; he was feeling its very essence.
His consciousness plunged into a swirling, incandescent galaxy of elements. He could feel the vast, churning river of iron at its core. But he could also sense the impurities within it—the stubborn, latticed patterns of carbon, the volatile pockets of sulfur that flashed and popped, and the oily, resistant veins of phosphorus that clung to the iron, refusing to be burned away. He could feel the temperature fluctuations across the molten sea, minute variations invisible to any pyrometer yet invented. He sensed a vortex, a cool spot no bigger than a man's head, in the northwest quadrant of the vessel.
His eyes snapped open. They seemed to burn with a faint, internal light. He turned, his gaze falling directly on the stunned German engineer.
"The problem is not just the phosphorus, Herr Schmidt," QSH said, his voice cutting through the furnace's roar. "Your temperature is fluctuating by at least twelve degrees in the northwest quadrant of the vessel. It's caused by an inconsistent airflow from your primary bellows." He pointed to a complex series of pipes feeding air into the converter. "Tell your men to increase the pressure from that secondary intake by precisely seven percent. No more, no less. And you are adding the limestone flux far too late in the burn cycle. You are waiting for the highest temperature. That is wrong. The phosphorus is most vulnerable before the carbon burns off completely. Add it now."
Schmidt's mouth hung open, his face a mask of utter disbelief. "Majesty… that is… that is impossible! We have no way to measure such things! The internal temperature, the flow… it cannot be known!"
"And yet, I know it," QSH replied, his voice turning to ice. It was not a suggestion; it was an absolute command. "Do it."
Spurred into action by the sheer force of the boy's will, the German engineer began screaming a series of commands in a frantic mixture of German and Chinese. The foreman, though terrified and confused, relayed the orders. Workers scrambled to turn heavy iron wheels, adjusting the valves on the air intakes. Another team released a trolley, sending a cascade of crushed limestone into the roaring heart of the furnace.
For a terrifying moment, the converter shuddered and belched a gout of black, angry smoke. The roar faltered, and Li Hongzhang took an involuntary step back, fearing the entire volatile contraption might explode.
Then, the sound changed. The violent, sputtering roar smoothed out, transforming into a pure, clean, white-hot hum. The very quality of the light spilling from the mouth of the converter seemed to brighten. After three more minutes—a period of tense, awestruck silence—the foreman gave the signal for the pour.
The massive vessel tilted, and a river of flawless, incandescent liquid steel flowed into the mold below. It was not the angry orange-red of the previous, flawed pours. This was a brilliant, almost white light, a liquid sun that flowed like water, without a single spark of impurity.
Later, after the steel had cooled enough for a sample to be taken, Herr Schmidt examined the small ingot, turning it over and over in his hands. His face was pale, his expression one of religious awe. "Perfect," he whispered, his voice trembling. "It is… perfect steel. The grain is flawless. It is stronger, purer, than anything we make back in Essen." He looked up at the boy Emperor, who was now calmly discussing naval trajectories with Meng Tian. "How?" Schmidt breathed. "How could you possibly have known?"
QSH did not deign to answer the question. He simply turned away from the cooling steel. "Replicate the process precisely, Herr Schmidt. I expect no more wasted pours from this arsenal."
He walked out of the foundry into the cool evening air, leaving the German engineer staring at the metal sample as if it were a holy relic. Li Hongzhang hurried to catch up, his mind reeling. He had always known the Emperor was a prodigy, a political genius beyond his years. But this was something else. This wasn't genius. It wasn't knowledge gleaned from a book. It was an impossible, divine insight that defied all logic and reason.
He looked at the small figure of his Emperor, silhouetted against the setting sun, and for the first time, Li Hongzhang felt a profound sense of awe mingled with a deep, unsettling fear. He was not merely serving a brilliant ruler. He was serving a force of nature.