On the covered cedar porch of Sunset Peak’s Timber Lodge, Austin was aggressively swiping at thin air.
Through the dark green glass of his Shade-14 arc-welding goggles, he glared at the floating blue diagnostic screen projected two inches in front of his nose.
His thumb stabbed the interface toggles with sharp, vicious pecks:
*Tap-tap-tap-tap.*
"Unforgivable," Austin growled, his voice muffled by the chin strap of his Sovereign Hard Hat. "Pure, amateur-hour slop."
He clicked his yellow grease pencil against the cedar rail three times in rapid succession:
*Click. Click. Click.*
"Who the hell pushed this build to main?!" Austin snapped, glaring through the welding glass at the blinding southern horizon. "You drop a full thermonuclear physics engine into the player character, and you hard-code the post-processing bloom filter to five hundred percent?! There isn't a master brightness toggle! No gamma calibration grid! You can't even turn off the damn chromatic aberration!"
He jabbed his pencil toward the valley:
"Look at that ridgeline! Clipped to pure white! Blown-out trash! The dynamic range is so completely fried you can't tell where the rock ends and the clouds start! I'm sitting on my own front porch wearing shade-fourteen glass just to read a tape measure without giving myself arc-eye! Step outside without eye protection and your retinas turn to scrambled eggs in three seconds flat!"
The heavy oak door behind him groaned open.
"G-Grand Senior...?"
Li Xiaoyao stumbled out onto the porch, hugging the doorframe with both arms.
The kid was doubled over, hiding his face behind wide silk sleeves. Even with his Foundation Realm Stage 3 cultivation, tears of raw optical agony soaked his cuffs, his eyelids squeezed shut:
"Grand Senior... the holy light... the ancient fire of creation! Mortal eyes cannot behold the seat of your golden core! It is as if the Upper Heavens shattered, and nine thousand sun deities have descended to scour our sins with pure light!"
Austin stopped swiping at his menus and turned his head, looking down at his disciple through the dark green lenses.
He let out a long, gravelly sigh that buzzed his hard hat strap:
"It’s not nine thousand sun deities, Xiaoyao. It’s blown-out dynamic range from lazy shader programming. Some junior code-monkey cranked the exposure curve because he thought bright lights meant high fidelity, and now the whole province has to suffer through migraine auras because nobody compiled a proper tone-mapping curve."
"The... tone-mapping...?" Xiaoyao whimpered, peeking through a crack between two trembling fingers. A bounce of golden glare off the floorboards hit him, and he instantly slammed his eyes shut with a sharp yelp. "Is that an ancient seal of the First Epoch?!"
"No, it’s basic middle-school math that keeps bright pixels from clipping to solid white," Austin said flatly. "A function this bootleg world engine clearly botched."
Austin stepped across the deck, his boots thudding heavy on the floorboards: *Clomp. Clomp.*
He bent down beside the wooden bench near the door, reached under the lower shelf, and hauled out a heavy olive-drab canvas crate stenciled in bold black lettering: **SURFACE OPTICAL SAFETY EQUIPMENT - ANSI Z87.1 COMPLIANT**.
With a quick flick of his thumbs, he popped the brass latches: *Snap-clack.*
He threw the lid back.
Inside, resting in laser-cut charcoal foam slots, sat row upon row of **Polarized Shade-5 Polycarbonate Ballistic Safety Glasses**—sleek, wrap-around black nylon frames with integrated side shields and dark emerald lenses coated with scratch-resistant film.
Austin reached in, grabbed a pair, and flipped them underhand toward the kid:
"Catch. Put them on before you scorch your corneas into beef jerky."
Xiaoyao heard the whistle of air. His Foundation Realm reflexes kicked in; his shaking hand snatched the frames out of the air by the bridge.
He held the object against his chest, squinting through streaming tears.
Back in Austin's world, they were four-dollar wholesale shop glasses sold by the gross out of an industrial supply catalog.
To Li Xiaoyao, they looked like divine craftsmanship.
The flexible nylon felt strange and weightless, but the curved lenses took the breath right out of his chest. Deep, flawless emerald, shimmering with microscopic concentric anti-glare rings that broke the stray light into soft green haloes.
"Ancestors preserve me..." Xiaoyao breathed, hands trembling. "The **Sacred Emerald Lenses of the Void**! Relics forged by the Sovereign to let mortals gaze upon the sun without having their souls dissolved into grease!"
"They're shade-five safety glasses, Xiaoyao," Austin said, tone dead as a poured foundation. "They cost four dollars in bulk scrap materials. Hook them over your ears."
Treating the plastic arms like ancient dragon bones, Xiaoyao lifted the glasses and slid them over his ears.
He pressed the soft rubber nose pads into place.
*Click.*
The kid gasped.
The world didn't just change; it settled down.
The white-hot furnace glare vanished in an eyeblink. In its place, the entire mountain summit was bathed in cool, crisp, soothing emerald dawn.
Through the polarized lenses, all that washed-out glare got stripped away clean. The blank white sky resolved into deep, crystalline mountain atmosphere. Xiaoyao could pick out individual pine needles on ridges three leagues away. The grain in the cedar deck popped with razor-sharp clarity.
He tilted his head toward the heavens and beheld the core.
Through the green glass, the Second Sun was a magnificent, roiling sphere of thermonuclear fire. He could see magnetic plasma loops arcing across its perimeter, bubbling heat cells churning like boiling honey, and the silver web of the First Epoch Containment Mesh locking it all in place.
He looked at Austin's clipboard and realized he could read the tiny pencil notes from twenty paces out.
Fresh tears ran down the boy’s cheeks—not from burning glare, but from pure, unadulterated awe.
He dropped to his knees, palms flat on the deck:
"The Emerald Eyes of Heaven! The Grand Senior has granted this disciple the divine sight of the emperors! I can see the veins of the sun! I can see the breath of creation! The wrath of the heavens has become a quiet jade spring!"
Austin looked down at him through his Shade-14 glass, unimpressed. He reached out and tapped the rim of Xiaoyao's frames with his yellow grease pencil:
*Tink.*
"They are polarized polycarbonate lenses, Xiaoyao. They block ninety-nine point nine percent of ultraviolet radiation and kill horizontal glare using iodine crystal alignment. There is no jade spring. There is only high school optics and proper personal protective equipment."
Austin gave his pencil another click:
"Work on a commercial job site without certified eye protection and you don't get enlightenment. You get cataracts, macular degeneration, and a permanent blind spot in your central vision by age thirty. Wear them on every daylight shift."
Before the kid could knock his forehead on the boards again, the summit freight hoist groaned to a halt at the edge of the terrace:
*CLANK-RATTLE-THUD!*
The elevator platform shuddered as the mechanical safety dogs bit into the vertical guide rails.
Stumbling off the iron deck came Tie Kuang and Old Patriarch Jiang Taixu.
Both were in pure agony.
Tie Kuang had both thick blacksmith forearms clamped over his face, his gear-shaped Golden Core whirring frantically inside his ribs to deflect the photon storm:
"Master Austin! It’s like standing inside an open blast furnace! The light has claws! My whiskers are singeing!"
Beside him, Jiang Taixu staggered blindly, clutching rolled blueprints to his ribs while using his silk sleeves as an improvised blindfold:
"Grand Senior! My spiritual perception is roasting inside my skull! The ditch crews on the lower terrace are diving headfirst into mud puddles just to get out of the light!"
"Tie Kuang! Jiang!" Austin’s voice cut through the racket like an air horn. "Quit flopping around like hooked carp and get over here!"
The dwarf and the patriarch shuffled toward the porch railing, guided by the gravel under their boots.
"Master Austin... do you possess a divine spirit ward to shelter us from heaven's wrath?!" Jiang Taixu wheezed, squeezing his eyelids shut while sweat dripped from his brows.
"I’ve got something better than a spirit ward," Austin said. "I’ve got OSHA compliance."
He kicked the olive-drab canvas crate on the porch floor with his boot heel:
"Grab these crates. Two hundred pairs of Shade-5 wrap-around safety glasses per bin. Take three bins down on the freight lift right now. Every laborer, apprentice, foreman, and elder on this job site wears certified Shade-5 eye protection within twenty minutes, or nobody works."
Tie Kuang pried two fingers apart. His bloodshot eyes caught the rows of emerald-tinted lenses nestled in the foam:
"Master Austin... are these... the legendary Green Jade Soul-Spectacles of the Void?!"
"They are OSHA-mandated eye protection!" Austin barked, rapping the shell of his Sovereign Hard Hat with his knuckles. "Under OSHA Standard 1910.133, paragraph A, subsection one: employers shall ensure that each affected employee uses appropriate eye or face protection when exposed to hazardous radiation!"
Austin shook his clipboard at them:
"We are standing beneath an unshielded five-hundred-petawatt fusion reaction throwing ten gigawatts of thermal-optical scatter! That qualifies as severe hazardous radiation in any municipality with a municipal building department! If one laborer catches arc-eye or logs retinal fatigue, I’m slapping a stop-work order on the whole mountain! Move!"
Tie Kuang and Jiang Taixu grabbed the canvas bins like men snatching bread in a famine.
"Understood, Master Austin!" Tie Kuang roared. "We shall enforce the Holy Standard of 1910.133 with our blood!"
"Not with your blood, with your PPE!" Austin hollered back. "Put your own damn glasses on first before you trip down the elevator shaft!"
*Click. Click.*
On the porch, Tie Kuang and Jiang Taixu snapped their green spectacles into place.
Two ragged gasps echoed across the deck.
"I can see..." Jiang Taixu whispered, staring down at his wrinkled knuckles in the cool, soothing emerald wash. "The wrath of the heavens... subdued by the Holy Relic of 1910... Praise the Builder..."
"To the trenches!" Tie Kuang bellowed, his courage roaring back. "Distribute the Sacred Emerald Lenses to the workforce!"
Ten minutes later, the terraced slopes of Sunset Peak had turned into a scene of surreal, high-efficiency Daoist construction.
Three thousand cultivators—men who had been trying to gut each other over sect rivalries two months ago—were now dressed in identical gear: high-visibility neon-orange vests, yellow fiberglass hard hats with chin straps snugged tight, and wrap-around emerald Shade-5 glasses.
They marched along the trenches looking like a brigade of cybernetic monks deployed from an orbital engineering corps.
High atop a fresh spoil-pile, Grand Elder Xuan Xiao stood with his boots dug into the dirt, his long white beard tucked securely inside his orange vest. Through his green lenses, he glared straight into the fiery belly of the Second Sun, bellowing with triumphant laughter:
"Brothers! Disciples! Rejoice!" Xuan Xiao’s voice boomed across the mountain terraces. "Through the Sacred Emerald Lenses granted by the Sovereign, the burning fury of the firmament has been turned into a mild spring morning! Our eyes do not burn! Our spirits do not faint! Heed the holy decree of Section 1910! Grab your spades! Check your line levels! Dig the drainage trenches for the glory of the Master Contractor!"
"Hoorah!" three thousand cultivators roared in unison.
Iron shovels and trenching picks bit into the granite with rhythmic, concussive clatter:
*CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!*
Up on the porch of the Timber Lodge, Austin watched through his dark Shade-14 glass as the crews below moved with crisp, textbook precision.
He flicked his eyes to the corner of his HUD.
The job site safety compliance metric ticked up from a pathetic 14% to a clean, flawless **100.0%**.
Austin let out a slow breath of relief.
He walked back to his cedar rocking chair, sat down with a quiet creak of wood, and unclipped his inspection pad.
With site safety locked down, he could finally inspect the real prize of his Level 50 breakthrough: the newly unlocked Tier 5 industrial blueprints.