Across the boundless, ancient expanses of the Central Continent, bells of heavy temple bronze had tolled without pause for three days and three nights.
From the snow-crested spires of the Heavenly Sword Range to the sun-baked plateaus of the Southern Fire Plains, the spiritual firmament had quaked. In the subterranean ancestral crypts of the Radiant Sun Orthodoxy, the Ten Thousand Sword Zenith, and the Iron Zen Monastery, ancient elders who had slept in deep meditative hibernation for centuries burst through their runic stone sarcophagi. With desiccated limbs, wild gray hair, and hollow eyes burning with apocalyptic dread, they pointed trembling, withered fingers toward the eastern heavens.
The sky had split. A second celestial orb—a blazing, golden star of terrifying, impossible density—had risen over the barbarian eastern frontier of the Great Yan Empire, casting its unblinking, blinding radiance across ten thousand leagues of mortal earth.
Worse, rumors carried by panicked imperial scouts spoke of cosmic madness and military subjugation. Twelve of the Great Yan Imperial Navy’s finest floating titanium dreadnoughts—the invincible pride of the Eastern Seas—had vanished into the demon mountain’s domain. Whispered dispatches reported that the warships had been stripped of their imperial battle flags, their void-sails permanently grounded, their massive hulls trapped in monstrous yellow iron shackles known in horrified rumors as the "Great Golden Clamps of Eternal Parking."
"A demon god of the First Epoch has awakened!" proclaimed Holy Patriarch Guang Ming. His voice rolled across the Hall of Ten Thousand Sages like deep, thunderous brass.
Guang Ming was an ancient sovereign of the late Soul Formation realm. He stood seven feet tall, clad in layered robes of spun sunlight and crowned with a roaring celestial halo of pure solar fire that scorched the air around his head.
"This ancient fiend hovers above the mortal earth, consuming the ancient ley lines and bending the very fabric of space with unnatural gravity!" Guang Ming shouted, raising his seven-foot Solar Godblade toward the vaulted temple rafters. "If we do not march this day, the Second Sun shall incinerate the very pillars of the firmament and turn our fertile plains into a sea of molten glass!"
Thus was forged the **Grand Crusader Alliance of the Ten Sacred Sects**.
One thousand elite cultivators had answered the mobilization decree. These were not green outer disciples or humble scripture clerks; every single warrior was a battle-hardened Foundation Realm champion or a Golden Core elder. They marched in dragon-scale mail and enchanted lamellar armor, wielding earth-grade spirit treasures and carrying bundles of consecrated demon-cleansing talismans.
Above them floated thirty-six golden war-chariots drawn by celestial horned drakes, their iron-shod wheels rumbling against the clouds like thunderclaps. Flanking the chariots was the colossal flagship of the crusade: the *Glorious Dawn*, an ancient flying pagoda carved from nine-thousand-year-old white jade, measuring three hundred feet from stem to stern and bristling with sixty Heaven-Severing Light Ballistas.
Standing at the forward prow of the *Glorious Dawn* alongside Patriarch Guang Ming were two other supreme titans of the Central Continent.
To his left stood Grand Abbot Wu Nian of the Iron Zen Monastery. The abbot’s skin gleamed like polished cast bronze, untouched by blade or fire, and in his right hand he held a nine-ringed khakkhara staff forged from meteorite iron. To his right stood Sword Matron Ling Yue of the Nine Heavens Frost Pavilion, her jade-white face colder than glacial ice, nine floating swords of condensed frost swirling around her slender waist like frozen ribbons of winter mist.
"Look ahead," Matron Ling Yue whispered, her voice crisp as cracking ice. Her spiritual sense, normally capable of surveying a hundred leagues unimpeded, suddenly recoiled as if burned by an open blast furnace. "The miasma... no. That is not miasma. That is pure, unadulterated, mathematical fire."
The thousand holy crusaders crowded the ship railings and peered down from their war-chariots.
A collective gasp of sheer, paralyzing dread rippled through the fleet.
There, towering above the jagged granite peaks of Sunset Ridge, hung the Second Sun.
Even from five leagues away, the rock-solid, steady balance of Austin’s Level 55 Main Sequence Core exerted an inescapable physical pressure that pressed against their dantian centers. The light it cast did not waver in the mountain breeze; it radiated with ruthless thermodynamic certainty, piercing through the cloud banks in sharp, clean, parallel shafts of golden brilliance.
Directly beneath the hovering star sat the mountain facility. Eight colossal, eighty-foot titanium cooling towers hissed in steady, rhythmic unison, venting towering plumes of pristine white steam that curled upward into the azure sky.
"Look at those obsidian pillars..." Grand Abbot Wu Nian murmured, his bronze knuckles whitening against his nine-ringed staff. "Eight towers of nether-metal, breathing white vapor! Those are the legendary Cauldrons of Torment! The demon lord is venting the tortured souls of the underworld directly into the heavens!"
"And beneath the towers!" an elder of the Ten Thousand Sword Zenith screamed, pointing a trembling hand downward. "The twelve Imperial Dreadnoughts of Great Yan! Look at them! Sunk onto massive timber trestles, their spirit cannons disarmed, their crews forced into strange, blindingly bright orange penitence smocks! Look! The enslaved soldiers are hauling wheelbarrows of stone! They are harvesting the crushed corpses of the earth to feed the demon’s furnace!"
"Monstrous..." Sword Matron Ling Yue murmured, her frost swords chiming with agitated shivers. "He has bound the mighty imperial navy into slave labor. The rumors of the Great Golden Clamps were true!"
Patriarch Guang Ming drew his seven-foot Solar Godblade, its blade igniting with righteous golden fury:
"Brothers and sisters of the Righteous Path! Steel your hearts! The demon lord who dwells beneath this mountain has built a fortress of absolute blasphemy! He dares mock the true sun with his artificial abomination! We shall land upon his obsidian courtyard, breach his subterranean hell-gates, and cleanse this mountain in the sacred name of the Heavenly Dao!"
"Cleanse the mountain! Slay the Solar Fiend!" roared a thousand voices in unison, their battle cry shaking the valley like an earth-shattering tempest.
The thirty-six golden war-chariots and the colossal jade pagoda descended through the clouds, their crimson banners whipping wildly, their combined spiritual auras blasting back the surrounding pine trees with hurricane-force gale winds.
They braced for an unholy ambush.
They expected swarms of winged blood-gargoyles tearing through their rigging. They prepared for waves of venomous shadow-spiders erupting from the flagstones, or shrieking zombie legions rising from the earth to drown them in necrotic sludge.
Instead, as the heavy white jade landing skids of the *Glorious Dawn* touched down upon the polished obsidian flagstones with a soft, resonant scrape, the holy crusaders were greeted by a scene of unbelievable, everyday normalcy.
There were no severed heads on pikes. There was no river of boiling blood.
Instead, occupying the center of the vast Obsidian Plaza, stood three neat rows of polished brass poles connected by thick, heavy crimson velvet ropes, snaking in an orderly switchback pattern. The polished obsidian flagstones beneath their boots had been swept clean, showing crisp yellow arrows stenciled neatly with resin paint.
Beside the velvet ropes stood two large, cleanly varnished cedar receptacles with brass push-flaps. One was neatly stenciled in bold black lettering: *COMPOSTABLE ORGANICS ONLY*. The other was labeled: *MIXED RECYCLABLES / NON-FERROUS SCRAP*.
At the end of the velvet rope maze stood an octagonal cedar booth with a reinforced sliding glass window.
Behind the glass sat a single youth of perhaps sixteen years, dressed in midnight-blue disciple robes covered by a fluorescent orange high-visibility safety vest. On his chest gleamed an engraved brass badge. He held a brass mechanical hand-stamp in one hand and was calmly checking the alignment of a stack of purple cardstock tickets.
Just outside the booth, curled contentedly on an oil-stained wool moving blanket, lay a colossal, eight-hundred-pound three-headed beast. Its left head was resting on an empty wooden fruit crate; its center head was rhythmically chewing on a stick of dried beef jerky; and its right head was snoring softly, occasionally twitching an ear as a mountain butterfly drifted past.
The entire holy army came to an awkward, stuttering halt on the landing ramp.
"What... what manner of demonic illusion is this?" whispered an elder of the Nine Heavens Frost Pavilion, his sword trembling in his grip. "Where are the blood pits? Where are the weeping specters? What are those wooden bins?"
"Look at the script upon the wooden boxes," Abbot Wu Nian muttered, squinting through the gloom. "'Compostable Organics Only.' It is a sacrificial urn for organic remains! The demon demands our entrails!"
Patriarch Guang Ming stepped off the landing skids, his boots hitting the obsidian flagstones with deliberate weight. His solar halo flared with blinding intensity, his late Soul Formation pressure washing across the courtyard like a tidal wave of golden fire.
He strode past the wooden recycling bins, marching toward the cedar booth with his seven-foot godblade leveled directly at the youth behind the glass:
"Spawn of the Nether-Sun!" Guang Ming’s voice shook the very foundation of the mountain. "We are the Grand Crusader Alliance of the Ten Sacred Sects! We have crossed ten thousand leagues to purge your demonic master, dismantle his false star, and cleanse this peak with the pure light of the Heavenly Dao! Present your demon king to face divine retribution!"
Li Xiaoyao did not tremble. He did not drop his stamp. He did not even reach for a weapon.
He simply slid the cedar booth’s reinforced glass window open with a smooth, well-oiled *click*.
Xiaoyao looked up from his ledger, adjusted his brass *Chief Guest Experience Officer* badge with two fingers, and spoke with polite, crystal-clear municipal clarity:
"Welcome to Sunset Peak Labyrinth, honored pilgrims. If you are here for the 1,000-Man Crusade Experience, please assemble in single file within the red velvet stanchions. The express raid ticket for a group of your size is four hundred and fifty thousand spirit stones, payable in advance."
Patriarch Guang Ming froze mid-stride, his solar godblade hovering motionless in the thin mountain air. His jaw dropped, his blazing halo flickering with absolute incomprehension.
Behind him, Grand Abbot Wu Nian and Sword Matron Ling Yue stared in stunned paralysis.
"You..." Guang Ming stammered, his divine majesty momentarily short-circuiting: "What did you just say?"