*CRACK-CRUNCH.*
The sound of seasoned cedar tearing apart echoed across the heights of Sunset Peak like a twelve-gauge shotgun detonating in a tiled basement.
The two-ton iron anchor had eighty miles an hour behind it. Forged from crude, pitted pig iron full of slag pockets and cold shuts, its bottom fluke bit straight through the outer line of Austin’s perimeter fence. Two hand-squared four-by-four posts went flying. Their clean, hand-cut mortise-and-tenon joints—planed square without a millimeter of slop and seated with dry oak dowels—snapped like dry kindling.
Behind them came the chain. Rusted links the size of cast-iron skillet rims whipped across the red dirt like a berserk iron python, throwing sparks off the quartz gravel.
The heavy links caught the mason's stringline.
Austin had spent forty-five solid minutes on his knees out there with a folding wooden rule and a brass line level, getting that braided hemp cord drawn straight, true, and taut as a banjo string. He had sighted it four times from both directions, tapping the corner stakes down millimeter by millimeter to eliminate any trace of parallax error. The iron chain snapped it in half a heartbeat. The pointed pine stakes were ripped from the turf, cartwheeling into the blackberry scrub fifty paces off, while the anchor flukes gouged a raw, jagged trench straight through the center of the bed.
He had measured and amended that plot specifically for Heirloom Nantes carrots. Sixty-five-day harvest cycle. Sweet, crisp taproots that roasted up tender with wild mountain parsnips, crushed garlic, and dried thyme. He had blended the top layer himself—two parts sifted river sand, two parts aged leaf mold, one part pulverized wood ash—to give the roots room to push straight down without knotting. He had dragged the seed furrows to an exact half-inch depth, spaced three inches apart, with a two-percent grade off the western edge to ensure proper drainage during heavy spring cloudbursts.
Now the whole patch looked like someone had dropped an unexploded naval shell in the dirt. Loam, gravel, and shredded pine mulch lay scattered in violent, jagged heaps.
Worse, the skiff’s twin engines were running dirty. Horribly dirty. Thick, oily black soot from burning corpse-coal rolled over the gunwales in greasy, choking billows. It drifted down through the clear mountain air like greasy flakes of black dandruff, settling directly across coordinate `[X: 04, Y: 12]` of his mirror-smooth obsidian courtyard in a sticky, tar-black smear.
Overhead, thirty yards above the shingles, seventy feet of black ironwood hull hung suspended on creaking flotation runes and rusted iron turnbuckles.
"BWAHAHAHA!"
Captain Sha Yan’s grating roar rattled the porch windowpanes. He leaned out over the bowsprit, resting a heavy, spiked boot on the bronze capstan, laughing through yellow, filed fangs.
"Look at the grand Clear Sky Sect!" Sha Yan bellowed down to the decks behind him, his scarred face splitting in cruel delight. "Ran five miles uphill through the brambles with their tongues hanging out, just to curl up like kicked dogs behind a peasant's cabbage shed! Today, not even your dead ancestors are digging you out of this hole!"
Down in the scrub weeds beyond the finished flagstones, two hundred battered Clear Sky cultivators were packed shoulder to shoulder like sheep pressed against a slaughterhouse chute.
Gu Qing was down on both knees in the dirt. His imperial violet silk robes were blackened by corpse-fire and shredded along the forearms, his ribs aching with every ragged breath as he coughed dark, sticky clots into the weeds. Chief Elder Zhao stood over him, knuckles white, trembling so hard his iron punishment staff clattered against his bronze belt buckle. Beside them, Elder Mu Chen kept both hands pressed against his heavy bronze cauldron, pill fire guttering out like a drowned wick in an oil lamp.
Around them, sixty Foundation elders and over a hundred junior disciples were weeping quietly. Chipped swords trembled in numb fingers. Their skin was the color of wet limestone as they stared up at the three heavily armed warships circling the peak like fat buzzards over a drying carcass.
"It's finished," an outer girl whispered, her knees giving out in the wild clover, tears cutting clean pale lines down her soot-stained cheeks. "The mountain pass is cut behind us. We ran into a blind dead end... and we dragged a poor mortal hermit into the butcher's pen with us..."
"Shut your fool mouth!" Elder Mu hissed frantically through his teeth, spraying red spit into the grass.
He didn't look at the warship hovering directly above their skulls. He didn't even look at the thirty archers lining the bulwarks with black recurves drawn. His bloodshot eyes were glued to the closed front door of the pine cabin, wide and terrified.
"Open your blind eyes and see what those swamp bastards just did," Mu Chen whispered, his voice trembling like a loose wire in a gale. "They shattered His cedar posts. They tore His alignment cord to ribbons. They dumped engine soot all over His finished obsidian floor. May heaven and earth have mercy on their souls, because the sun itself is about to come off its hinges."
Gu Qing grabbed a junior deacon by the collar, his bloody fingers digging into the silk. "Keep your heels back! I see your sandal heel crossing the gravel boundary! Pull your feet into the weeds, boy! If you kick a loose stone onto His polished grade, none of us will live to see the sunset!"
Young Master Bai Chen, huddled in the scrub with his knees pulled tightly to his chest, was shaking so violently his teeth sounded like castanets. "He's coming out... the Master of Flatness is coming out... someone pray for the sky... please, someone pray for the sky..."
*CREAK.*
The solid pine door swung inward on oiled ash hinges.
The mountain went dead quiet.
No ordinary quiet, either. Heavy, suffocating silence pressed down like an airless vault. The pine breeze died in mid-gust. The distant drone of demonic war drums dropped an octave, smothered by an unnatural plunge in atmospheric sound propagation. Even the dust motes floating over the flagstones seemed to stop drifting, trapped in an invisible, tightening vise of raw gravitational pull.
Austin stepped out onto the porch.
He wore his washed-out grey hemp trousers, woven straw sandals, and a white canvas apron tied around his ribs with rough jute cord. In his left hand, he held a flat bamboo dustpan. In his right, a short hearth broom bound with clean broomcorn straw.
He didn't spare a glance for the fifty warships blotting out the sun over the main valley.
He didn't look at the two hundred bleeding cultivators shaking in the wild grass.
He didn't even look up at the seventy-foot war vessel hovering thirty yards over his ridge-vent.
Austin walked down the three pine steps. His straw sandals made dry, rhythmic scuffs on the black volcanic glass. He strolled to the southwestern boundary of the courtyard, stopped right at the edge of the finished stone, rested his hands on the broom handle, and looked down.
Two splintered four-by-fours lay broken in the mud, fresh cedar sap mixing with red clay.
His carrot bed was a shredded ditch. His alignment twine was balled up in a briar patch fifty feet away. And right there on coordinate `[X: 04, Y: 12]`, a greasy, tar-slick splatter of corpse-coal exhaust sat baking onto his mirror-flat flagstones.
A muscle beside Austin’s left eye started jumping.
*Twitch. Twitch. Twitch.*
Down in the boiler room of his lower dantian, the sapphire-blue miniature sun spun up. Twenty-five thousand Kelvin of thermonuclear fire began a low, dangerous growl:
*HUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.*
A stray breath of thermal radiation slipped through the magnetic pinch coils. The temperature within ten paces of his sandals plummeted below zero. Moisture in the air froze instantly, falling as microscopic diamonds of frost, while localized gravity warped the midday sunlight around his shoulders into an obsidian silhouette fringed in razor-thin violet heat.
To Austin's analytical contractor eye, the floating ship above his house was an absolute disgrace. The timbers were warped spruce, held together with rusted bracket iron and sloppy drift pins. The flotation runes sputtered with erratic power fluctuations, bleeding spiritual energy like an ungrounded junction box. Uninsulated steam piping ran along the outer gunwales, dripping scalding condensate into the dirt. A flying fire hazard. A structural disaster. An insult to anyone who had ever picked up a plumb line or squared a frame.
And in Austin’s mind, there were no grand sect wars. No millennium-old vendettas between righteous immortals and demonic clans. No cosmic balances of yin and yang.
Only one unforgivable, capital offense against baseline site management:
Austin lifted his chin. His eyes traveled up thirty yards to the wooden keel suspended above his yard.
His voice wasn't loud. He didn't yell.
It was the cold, dry, dead-eyed rasp of a contractor who just watched a drywall crew back an overloaded flatbed truck through his fresh-cured concrete pad:
"Who dragged an iron anchor through my carrot twine?"
Up on the foredeck, Captain Sha Yan leaned over the brass rail, resting the broad flat of his scimitar across a spiked shoulder guard. He spat another dark stream of betel juice over the bulwark, watching it splash into the grass below.
"A peasant holding a kitchen broom?!" Sha Yan mocked, his jagged teeth flashing in the sun. "You sniveling worm! You dare talk back to the Blood Wolf vanguard? You ought to be kissing the dirt, thanking us for putting a torch to your miserable hovel! Archers! Turn this ditch-digger into a porcupine! Pin him to his porch boards!"
Twenty archers stepped up to the starboard rail in lockstep.
Their bows were black recurves glued up from thousand-year tiger bone and corpse-sinew. The archers pulled the strings back to their ears with a dry, groaning creak of stressed horn.
Twenty heavy, barbed iron bodkins—soaked in emerald centipede venom that could melt a man's meridians into black jelly in three heartbeats—aimed dead at Austin's chest.
They let fly together.
*TWANG-SHREEEEEEEEEEEK!*
The arrows shrieked like butchered pigs, tearing through the air at two hundred miles an hour, leaving greasy green vapor trails in their wake.
To Austin's eye, the whole volley was embarrassing. Bad fletching. Heavy wobble along the longitudinal axis. Zero compensation for the thermal updraft coming off the south ravine. Amateur hour. The kind of sloppy, reckless projectile work that would get a crane rigger kicked off a commercial job site before lunch.
"MASTER, LOOK OUT!" Li Xiaoyao shrieked, lunging forward with his bamboo broom held like a spear, his knuckles trembling white.
Over by the porch, Pug exploded onto all six paws. His three massive heads bristled with black fur, sabertooth fangs bared, violet lightning cracking between his jaws as eighty pounds of muscle bunched to leap into the sky.
Up on the cedar eaves, three Sun-Crows flared wings of pure liquid brass, beaks snapping open to spit solar plasma that could roast an iron kettle to slag.
Austin didn't budge. He didn't shift his boots an inch.
He just lifted his left arm, holding the flat bamboo dustpan out in front of his chest like a tired clerk waiting for a delivery slip.
"Down, Pug," Austin muttered, his voice flat as a floorboard. "Keep the hens quiet. Don't waste the aggro on griefers. I'm writing this incident report myself."