The Ghost Wolf Shadow Step was one of the most feared stealth arts on the Southern Cloud continent. A master could cross dry leaves without making a sound and pass through guarded grounds like smoke.
Commander Xue Sha was such a master.
He led his six killers across Sunset Peak at sixty miles per hour. His poisoned hook swords were ready, and his eyes were fixed on Austin’s cabin.
Thirty yards. Twenty-five. Twenty.
His leading foot met empty air.
“What in the—”
Their speed carried all seven men over the edge.
THUD. CRUNCH. THWACK.
They fell four meters and landed in a tangled heap at the bottom of the trench.
“An ambush!” Xue Sha rolled to his feet. Twenty years as a killer kept his voice steady. “Leap for the rim! Use the walls!”
He drove his hook swords into the black surface.
SKRRRRRT!
Instead of biting into stone, the blades slid across the smooth glass and threw yellow sparks. Xue Sha dropped back to the floor.
“The walls are polished! There’s no grip!”
“Commander,” another assassin whispered, “there’s wire under our boots.”
Five bare copper lines ran across the trench floor. All seven men were standing on them.
Their steel-studded boots closed the circuit.
CLICK.
BZZZZZT—BAP!
Violet current jumped through the assassins. Their bodies went rigid, and their hair stood straight up. Their dark cloaks burned away. Even the escape talismans hidden in their sleeves turned to ash before they could use them.
Then they fell over.
Austin had not built a death trap. He had used the same principle as a livestock fence: a short pulse every second, enough to teach an animal not to lean on the wire. The difference was that his power source was a star.
The first pulse also burned through the soul threads connecting each assassin to his life tablet in Blood Wolf Castle. The men themselves survived.
Mostly unharmed, anyway.
Xue Sha pushed himself onto one knee.
Tick. BAP.
He sat down again, smoking.
Tick. BAP.
“Commander,” someone groaned, “my teeth are humming.”
“Nobody—” BAP. “—touch the wire!”
“We’re standing on it!”
The pulses continued all night, one per second. The deep trench muffled each snap until it reached the cabin as a faint, steady tock.
Austin rolled over and pulled the quilt around his shoulders.
“Mob grinder’s working,” he murmured. “Good drop rate.”
Then he went back to sleep.
***
At six o’clock, soft dawn light filtered through the dragon-silk curtains.
Austin woke rested and clear-headed. He stretched until his shoulders popped, then opened the morning report.
“Level four already? Three hundred and seventy-five experience while I slept. That’s why automation matters.”
He stepped onto the porch. Li Xiaoyao was already meditating in the courtyard mist.
“Morning, kid. Grab a basket. We’re cleaning out the collection ditch.”
Austin picked up a long rake and looked over the edge.
Seven exhausted men looked back.
During the night, the current had fused their hobnails to the wire. They had escaped by wriggling out of their boots. Now they stood barefoot on tiptoe between the live lines, holding each other’s shoulders for balance. Their masks and eyebrows were gone, and their frizzed white hair stood out around their heads.
“Senior,” Xue Sha croaked. “Great Immortal Ancestor. We surrender. Please make the humming stop.”
Austin looked at the wire, then at their bare feet.
“Seven trespassers on a live worksite at midnight. No lights. No hard hats. No sign-in sheet. Do you know how much paperwork this is?”
“We’ll sign anything,” another man sobbed.
Austin pulled the switch on the porch and hung a pine-bark tag over it. He had scratched LOCKED OUT into the bark with a nail.
The humming stopped. Someone in the trench began to cry with relief.
“Weapons first. Handles toward me. I’m not catching the sharp end.”
Fourteen hook swords, fourteen daggers, and seven storage pouches landed on the grass.
“Kid, tell the valley security office there are seven griefers in my drainage ditch. They can collect them at the curb.”
Li Xiaoyao ran. Before the frost melted, a squad of pale Disciplinary Hall guards arrived with chains and a ladder. The assassins climbed out one by one, thanking the guards and begging for the deepest cell available, as far from Sunset Peak as possible.
Austin examined the captured swords. Their curved tips gave him an idea.
He carried them to the vegetable garden and pushed them handle-first into the soil, eighteen inches apart. Then he tied hemp twine from hook to hook.
“Perfect trellis stakes for snow peas. They won’t rot, and they can hold heavy vines.”
He tossed a storage pouch to Li Xiaoyao.
“Here. Keep your small tools in this.”
The boy caught it and saw the wolf-skull crest. These men had come to kill them. Now their blades held up peas, and Austin had turned their raid into garden supplies.
Xiaoyao put his small pruning knife and twine into the pouch. “Thank you, Master.”
Austin nodded. He had opened Xue Sha’s pouch and found three bars of raw Abyssal Blood-Iron among the talismans and spirit stones.
He weighed one six-pound bar in his hand.
“Now that’s useful stock. Good, hard metal. I’ve needed a proper pipe wrench since day one.”
He set a heavy block of black stone on an oak stump for an anvil and heated the first bar with controlled star-fire. Within seconds, it glowed orange.
CLANG. CLANG. TONG.
Austin shaped a strong handle and a square head. From the second bar, he formed the hooked jaw and cut the adjustment threads. He added a thumbwheel, cut deep teeth into both jaws, and hardened them in oil. Then he assembled the tool.
Click-click.
The moving jaw slid smoothly, with no looseness.
The finished wrench was twenty-four inches long, dark blue, and well balanced. Austin clamped its teeth around the corner of a granite boulder and pulled.
CRACK.
A four-inch chunk of stone broke away. The teeth did not slip or chip.
“Now that’s a proper pipe wrench.” Austin wiped a smear of oil from the handle. “No more mickey-mousing fittings with the wrong pliers.”
He rested it across his shoulder, deeply satisfied.
***
At the first pulse the night before, seven sharp cracks had echoed through Blood Wolf Castle.
CRACK! CRACK! CRACK! CRACK! CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!
On the Ancestral Altar, all seven green soul tablets shattered into dust within a fraction of a second.
Patriarch Nether-Ghost sprang from his skull throne.
“ALL SEVEN? IN LESS THAN A BREATH? AND NOT ONE MESSAGE FOR HELP?”
Thirty demonic elders dropped to their knees behind him.
“Patriarch,” one cried, “what kind of god-killing formation is buried on Sunset Peak?”