Bad news travels fast. News of three hundred heavy cavalry getting dumped down a ravine like loose gravel by a kid with a broom moved like grease on a hot griddle.
By noon, the outer rings of the Clear Sky Sect were frozen in twitching hysteria.
The Bai Clan had run four provinces for three centuries—mines, silk sheds, grain barges. Yet according to every rumor in the tea stalls, Patriarch Bai Tian was barricaded in his shrine, drooling onto his brocade lapels while staring at a thumb-sized chunk of charcoal. Every few seconds he muttered the same three words: *terrible weapon durability.*
The official hammer dropped an hour later.
Three enforcers from the Disciplinary Hall marched up the mountain track. Jet-black robes. Silver thunderbolts on their collars. Faces stiff as green lumber. They carried an iron scroll wrapped in red silk, held out like an unexploded blasting cap.
They didn't cross the copper wire. They stopped twenty paces short, took one look at the three Golden Sun-Crows preening razor-sharp metallic primaries on the eaves, hurled the scroll into the dirt, yelled their summons, and hauled tail back down the trail.
Li Xiaoyao scrambled out, scooped up the cylinder, and ran it to the porch. His knees knocked like dry bamboo.
"M-Master!" The boy was pale as skimmed milk. "It's the Disciplinary Hall! Chief Elder Zhao has issued a Heavenly Writ! You're charged with Unlawful Mountain Excavation, Harboring Unregistered Divine Beasts, and Severe Disruption of Public Order!"
The kid dropped onto the boards, grabbing Austin's trousers.
"Master, you can't go down there! That place is an abattoir. Elder Zhao hasn't cracked a smile in two hundred years. Anyone dragged through those gates gets their dantian pinned with soul-sealing spikes and thrown into the Frozen Abyss!"
Austin took the cold scroll, cracked the wax with his thumb, and unrolled it.
He didn't care about the calligraphy. His eyes drifted straight to the glowing amber HUD in his vision:
Austin stared at the reward block. His pulse picked up.
"Five refined iron screws?" Austin muttered, tapping the scroll against his palm. "Threaded fasteners? Actual machine-cut pitch?"
He looked toward the corner of the porch.
Sitting against the log wall was an old, beat-up three-legged milking stool left by the body's previous tenant. A crime against carpentry. One mortise was split down the grain, the cross-brace was glued with dried pitch and wishful thinking, and sitting on it made the whole assembly list eight degrees to port. Austin spent every morning sipping pine tea and mentally cursing whatever hack had whittled the tenons with a dull axe.
Austin set his tea down, walked over, and grabbed the wobbly stool by the seat, tucking it under his arm.
"All right," Austin said, stepping into the gravel. "Let's go talk to the zoning board."
Li Xiaoyao scrambled up, blinking. "Master... why are you carrying a broken milking stool to a capital trial?"
Austin kept walking. "Administrative halls always have a maintenance shop in the basement. If I’m gonna sit through forty minutes of unskippable bureaucracy, I’m borrowing their bench vise and driving these new screws into this leg. The tilt is wrecking my lower back."
The boy froze mid-stride. His breath caught.
*A broken stool?!*
*No... that's impossible!* Li Xiaoyao’s mind spun into wild deduction. *The Master does not do trivial things! The three splayed legs represent the Three Pure Realms! The severed brace is the shattered tether of mortal law! He is carrying the Throne of Non-Attachment straight into the killing grounds to prove worldly judgment is fundamentally unaligned!*
Tears of hot worship welled in the teenager’s eyes. He wiped his nose on his sleeve.
"Master's divine intent cuts straight to the root of the firmament! This disciple shall follow your holy steps!"
"Leave the commentary, kid," Austin called back. "And watch your footing on the switchbacks. Loose shale will snap your collarbone before you hit the tree line."
***
The Disciplinary Hall was wedged into a volcanic gorge at the foot of the central peaks. Slapped together from blocks of black soul-iron, it reeked of wet slate and stagnant bilge. No exterior windows. Just slit vents twenty feet up whistling in the draft.
Inside, sixty heavy enforcers lined the flags in two ranks. Black plate armor. Six-foot punishment staves bound with copper wire and crackling with purple lightning runes. Ozone hung thick—the throat-catching stink of a blown three-phase transformer.
High on a tiered basalt dais sat Chief Elder Zhao Shen.
Eighty years past his prime, Zhao looked hewn out of quarry granite and left in the sleet. His silver beard brushed his belt buckle. His grey eyes were cold as slate shingles. In a hundred and twenty years of swinging the sect's iron gavel, nobody had ever spoken out of turn in his courtroom.
*THWACK.*
Zhao slammed the iron mallet against his sounding block. The boom rang through the vault like a split anvil.
"Bring forth the accused outer disciple, Chu Yuan!" Zhao bellowed.
The nine-ton double doors groaned inward on rusted pivot pins.
Every guard in the hall stiffened. Sixty Foundation Establishment auras flared together, rolling outward in a heavy wall of spiritual gravity meant to drop any entering felon onto their belly.
Down the black runner strolled a skinny youth in faded hemp.
Straw sandals. A slight slouch. Tucked casually beneath his left arm was a lopsided, grease-stained three-legged wooden stool.
Austin walked at an easy pace, squinting at the dark rafters.
"Terrible ambient lighting," Austin muttered, shaking his head at the sputtering torches. "Gamma is cranked to zero. You couldn't spot dry rot with a searchlight. Pure code violation."
He stopped five paces short of the dais steps, dead center in the suppression array's focus.
He didn't kneel. He didn't bow.
He swung the stool off his hip and dropped it onto the polished black stone.
*Clack-rattle.*
The loose leg hit first, wobbling with that obnoxious eight-degree cant. Austin wiped a smudge of sawdust off the top round, planted his backside squarely on the timber, crossed his right ankle over his left knee, and leaned back, resting his chin in his hand.
The sixty enforcers stared across the aisle at one another. Nobody breathed.
*He brought his own chair?*
*He sat down before the Grand Inquisitor told him to breathe?!*
Elder Zhao’s knuckles turned bone-white around his gavel. A wire-thin vein behind his temple pulsed.
"CHU YUAN!" Zhao's voice shook soot from the ceiling. "You stand charged with gross defiance of sect law! Demolishing the western roadbed! Harboring unregistered celestial raptors! Battering three hundred retainers of the Bai Clan into mud, and trading sovereign Nine-Yang Sun-Gold in daylight like ditch gravel! What say you to these crimes?!"
The sixty guards brought their lightning staves down together:
*BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.*
"ANSWER THE COURT!" they roared.
A heavy shockwave of spiritual mass slammed toward the wobbly seat—enough raw force to crush a boulder into gravel.
Austin didn't even shift his hips.
The wave hit the boundary layer three millimeters off his skin. Deep inside his dantian, the micro-plasma spark spun at four hundred thousand RPM. It didn't fight the incoming energy; it swallowed it. The sixty combined spiritual fields were sucked through Austin's thermal boundary, sheared into base ions by eleven thousand five hundred Kelvin of internal stellar heat, and vented out through his pores.
A warm breeze drifted through the frigid hall, smelling faintly of roasted parsnips.
Austin reached into his hemp sleeve, pulling out a flat cedar shim and a bent masonry nail he’d salvaged off his porch.
He leaned sideways, jammed the cedar wedge into the loose mortise, and tapped it home with the flat head of the nail.
*Tink. Tink. Tink.*
The small metallic clicks sounded unnervingly loud in the hall's dead silence.
Austin looked up at Elder Zhao with the deadpan stare of a finish carpenter waiting on an inspector who was four hours late.
"Look, chief," Austin said, his voice flat and tired. "Can we wrap up the opening remarks? I only walked down here because the prompt listed five refined iron screws as the turnaround reward. If you’ve got a shop rasp and a light ball-peen mallet in that desk, hand 'em over. This leg has an eight-degree splay on the joint and it’s digging into my sciatic nerve. Let's swap the hardware so I can get back up the hill before my tea gets cold."
Silence.
Heavy. Smothering. Absolute.
The enforcers stared at the boy on the stool. A few lowered their staves, gauntlets slack.
*He called the Grand Summons an opening remark?*
*He asked the Supreme Elder for a ball-peen mallet?!*
Elder Zhao sat frozen behind his bench. The gavel hung three inches above the block.
His gaze dropped from Austin's face to the wooden stool.
Then he looked directly into Austin’s eyes.
Behind that flat, exhausted tradesman squint, Zhao’s spiritual senses grazed something that turned the blood in his arteries to slush.
Deep in the youth’s dantian burned a blinding, white-hot, spherical furnace. Not spiritual qi. Not an elemental core. An ancient star, spinning with terrifying density. The sixty killing auras hadn't bounced off him; they had been inhaled like breadcrumbs tossed into an industrial furnace!
*He's not a disciple...* Zhao’s heart hammered against his ribs, icy sweat drenching his collar. *The First Epoch records... he is an Ancient Sovereign walking the dirt in mortal skin!*
Zhao looked down at the wooden stool again.
*The eight-degree tilt.*
*The splayed tenon.*
*The fractured cross-brace.*
*He wasn't talking about furniture!* Zhao realized in climbing terror. *He brought that crooked seat here as an indictment! He’s showing me that my entire court is tilted eight degrees off the heavenly plumb line! If I sentence him using our rotten rules, that cosmic furnace will turn this entire valley into boiling green glass!*
Elder Zhao let go of the gavel. His hands shook so hard the handle clattered against his wrist.
Slowly, carefully, Zhao rose from his high bench.
Every guard watched in numb horror as the most feared judge in four provinces gathered his black silk skirts and descended the dais steps, one pace at a time.
He stopped three feet from the wobbly stool.
Zhao didn't summon his execution blade. He dropped onto both knees on the cold flags, folded his trembling hands against his forehead, and touched his brow to the stone.
"This foolish junior... Zhao Shen... begs Senior’s pardon for our blindness," Zhao whispered, his voice cracking. "Our balance has slipped from the plumb line. Our measures are crooked. Senior's profound lesson has cracked this old fool's heart wide open."
Zhao reached frantically into his storage ring, pulling out a rosewood casket. He flipped the brass latch with numb fingers, revealing five heavy, six-inch structural screws forged from ancestral spirit-gold, glowing with faint protective wards.
"These are five Nine-Dragon Heaven-Screws from the sect's inner vault," Zhao choked out, holding the box high above his head. "May they... may they true the Senior's foundation!"
Austin leaned forward, picked up one of the gold-plated screws, and squinted at the threads.
"Machine-cut pitch," Austin muttered, nodding in mild approval. "Clean bevel on the countersink. Phillips head, too. Not bad for government work."
He stood up, tucked the box into his sleeve, grabbed his stool by the seat, and turned toward the exit.
"Appreciate it, Zhao," Austin said, walking toward the heavy iron doors. "Fix that draft under the front lintel while you're down here. You're losing twenty percent of your heat through that crack."