Under the five-fold gravitational pull from Austin’s newly compressed stellar core, the air in Floor 1 thickened into a warm, heavy soup. Breathing felt like dragging wet sand through a straw. The dense air pressed against eardrums and ribcages with the grinding weight of a tidal wave.
Supreme Grand Elder Tie Kuang lay jammed into the fractured floor tiles, coughing dark clots of venous blood onto the basalt. Every rib in his barrel chest groaned under the invisible ceiling of celestial weight. His Peak Golden Core spun violently in his dantian, kicking up sparks of magma-qi that suffocated the moment they hit his compressed meridians. Even his divine sense was pinched flat, unable to stretch three inches from his skull without dissolving into static.
Right before him stood the boy.
The young man had just laced two heavy lead plates into his work boots. He rolled his ankles in lazy half-circles, testing his balance with casual hops. He muttered to himself about "server tick rates," "encumbrance debuffs," and "proper pelvic ballast." To him, the crushing gravity field pulverizing an imperial grandmaster was just an inconvenient pair of stiff boots that needed breaking in.
Tie Kuang stared through a haze of crimson sweat, his gaze wandering across the subterranean workshop.
Against the far wall, mounted to a two-inch slab of black mountain slate, hung three massive copper busbars, polished until they gleamed like red gold. Porcelained insulators, ribbed like ancestral pagoda spires, separated the conductive bars from the stone. Beside them sat a steel drum with an external glass sight tube filled with amber fluid.
*A Thunder-Refining Leyline Altar,* Tie Kuang thought, his mind spinning in frantic confusion. *He has bound the lightning dragons of the upper atmosphere into copper conduits. The sacred amber nectar in that glass vessel must be the distilled marrow of a Nine-Heavens Thunder Beast, cooling the sacred array! What manner of forgotten First Epoch sect master has chosen this dirt pile as his tomb?!*
Shame, hot and poisonous, burned through Tie Kuang’s veins.
*He isn't even squaring his stance,* Tie Kuang thought, crimson tears blurring his vision. *He hasn't drawn a talisman. He hasn't whistled for a spirit beast. He's standing there tapping a wooden board with a yellow pencil while treating the weight of five mountains as a morning stretching routine!*
Thirty yards away, deep in the excavated Basalt Slag Holding Basin, five hundred battle miners lay pinned under the same crushing load.
"Look at the Grand Elder," whispered a drill sergeant, his nose mashed sideways against the crushed rock. "His Earth-Dragon plate is folding at the seams. Even his Golden Core can't push back the ceiling."
Director Tie Feng lay three feet away, his arms pinned flat to his sides, staring up at the vaulted cavern roof. A piece of dried turnip from his emergency lunch pouch was plastered against his cheek.
"He's pushed past reason," Tie Feng grunted, gravel grinding between his teeth. "For eighty years, Grand Elder Tie Kuang has never given up an inch of iron. When the Ministry of Works ordered us to retreat from the Black River Basin, he strangled the imperial envoy with a winch cable. He'd rather crack his dantian into gravel than surrender his pride to a mountain hermit."
"Can't he see the tools?!" the sergeant wheezed, his breastplate creaking under the five-gravity load. "Look at that blue spanner! That isn't spirit iron! It has the cold glow of the void! We're digging in an immortal god's private workshop, and the old man is still worrying about his imperial pension!"
"Pride is a terrible sickness, sergeant," Tie Feng sighed, his voice whistling through his teeth. "It makes old men blind and young men dead. Just keep your head down. If the ceiling comes down, the slag basin has the thickest retaining walls."
Tie Kuang felt the cold truth of the words vibrating through the stone floor beneath his cheek.
He was the Supreme Grand Elder of the Great Yan Iron Pavilion. He had bored the Abyssal Trenches of the Frozen Northern Waste. He had wrestled adult magma-drakes into submission with bare hands in the boiling depths of the Burning Sea. For two continuous centuries, provincial governors, high magistrates, and sect masters had bowed their heads whenever his iron war wagons rolled through their gates.
He was an imperial sovereign of the deep rock.
He would not end his days flattened like a wet frog on a cellar floor, staring at a youth in grease-stained denim overalls.
"If I am to perish in this unmarked cellar..." Tie Kuang whispered, the words bubbling through blood and cracked teeth into a ragged, guttural roar that vibrated the bedrock, "...THEN I WILL DIE WITH IRON IN MY HANDS!"
*CRACK-BOOM!*
Deep inside Tie Kuang’s dantian, the Peak Golden Core ignited into a blinding, suicidal fire.
He sacrificed one hundred years of his remaining mortal lifespan in a single heartbeat.
**[Forbidden Blood Art: Nine-Fold Earth-Splitting Asura Avatar]**!
A scalding fog of crimson blood mist blasted from every pore in Tie Kuang’s skin. The mist hit the high-pressure air and crystallized instantly into overlapping plates of blood-red volcanic obsidian. His muscles swelled, tearing through steel tendons and snapping the heavy forged rivets of his breastplate. Armor fragments blew across the hall like canister shot, pinging off the walls and sparking against the stone arches.
His frame surged upward. Eight feet became eleven feet of hulking, demonic mass.
Two curling horns of white-hot magma burst through the crown of his skull, dripping molten basalt onto his shoulders. Black Nether-Earth flames coiled around his forearms, hissing like grease on an open firebox. The heat rolled outward in a blistering wave, curling the edges of Austin's wooden tool crates and scorching the pine shavings on the floor.
From behind the pallet barricade, Li Xiaoyao buried his face in his grease gun, squeaking in pure terror. "The forbidden blood sacrifice! He broke his core for the Asura Avatar! Senior Austin, run! The whole cavern is going to cave in!"
Under the cast-iron workbench, the three draft pangolins curled into tighter spheres. Chonker jammed his head under Digger One's belly, squealing like a frightened piglet as their armored scales chattered against the floor tiles.
Tie Kuang bellowed—a raw, tearing howl that ripped his vocal cords to ribbons—and clamped both hands around the bronze haft of his two-thousand-pound Mountain-Crushing Warhammer.
*SCREEEEEECH!*
He tore the colossal hammer free from the floor, ripping out a two-hundred-pound chunk of basalt with the head.
The five-gravity field groaned, pressing down with the weight of a collapsed mineshaft, but the suicidal fury of his burning soul locked his legs straight. His boots ground into the floor, turning solid stone into gray talcum powder.
"ANCIENT CELESTIAL DEMON!" Tie Kuang roared, magma drooling from his jaws. "A MINER DOES NOT BEG! WE WHO DIG THE ROOTS OF THE WORLD BOW TO NO IMMORTAL! TASTE TWO HUNDRED YEARS OF BLOOD AND STEEL!"
Tie Kuang launched.
The floor beneath his heels exploded into a geyser of pulverized rock and black smoke.
Defying the localized gravity through brute momentum and the violent expansion of his burning life force, Tie Kuang blasted thirty feet straight up toward the vaulted ceiling of Floor 1.
High above, the two-thousand-pound Mountain-Crushing Warhammer began to swell. Nether-Earth fire and pressurized subterranean magma coalesced around the dark-iron head, feeding on the ambient earth qi of the mountain until the tool expanded into a thirty-foot-wide meteor of churning, molten destruction.
Heat washed over the workshop floor, hot enough to bubble paint.
*"ASURA HEAVEN-SPLITTER——!"*
The flaming titan dove from the ceiling, the thirty-foot molten hammer screaming downward at three times the speed of sound. A sonic cone of compressed air flattened everything in its path, howling with the fury of a derailed steam locomotive.
Down below, Austin was squinting at his clipboard.
He was halfway through line eight: *Disposal fee for 312 tons of scrap iron and six distressed draft oxen.*
The sudden flash of black fire and molten rock reflected straight off his polycarbonate safety glasses, triggering a sharp, throbbing ache behind his temples. Worse, the violent downdraft from the descending hammer caught the edge of his paperwork. The bronze spring clamp slipped, and three fresh carbon copies tore free, fluttering away into the draft like startled doves.
Austin grabbed for the loose sheets, caught one by the corner, and watched the other two get sucked into the waterwheel tailrace.
His jaw clenched until his molars ground together.
"Why is every single NPC in this place so ridiculously, aggressively loud?" Austin grumbled, his professional patience snapping clean through. "I asked a simple, straightforward question about wall repairs and liability insurance, and you turn into a circus act with a giant barbecue pit on your hammer."
He looked up at the descending thirty-foot molten meteor and shook his head in bitter disgust.
"Look at that swing trajectory," Austin muttered. "Terrible mechanics. Leading entirely with your shoulders. Your hips are totally out of alignment, your center of mass is floating, and you're swinging a thirty-foot molten fireball directly toward my auxiliary electrical switchgear!"
Austin glanced toward the north wall. His slate distribution board sat right beneath the hammer's fallout radius. Three raw copper busbars, fresh hand-bent conduit, and the glass sight gauge on the transformer. Austin had spent three hours that morning re-tapping the 1/2-inch conduit fittings with an old tap-and-die set, ensuring every single thread engaged clean and tight without burrs.
If a single glob of that burning slag splashed across the oil expansion tank, the hot mineral oil would flash into an open fireball and take out forty hours of rough-in wiring.
"Uncontrolled overhead load," Austin said, his voice flat with cold disgust. "Zero rigging certification. No tag lines. Swinging an unguided thirty-foot mass directly over critical electrical infrastructure. If my OSHA inspector saw this, he'd revoke my site permit before lunch."
He let go of the clipboard, letting it drop flat onto the steel tool cart.
He reached up with his right hand. His calloused fingers slid down the long, tapered I-beam handle of the five-foot Cosmic Star-Steel pipe wrench resting across his collarbone.
His grip settled over the textured lower knurling. His feet, anchored by the twenty pounds of forged lead boot liners, bit into the cracked obsidian floor like structural steel columns seated on bedrock.
He didn't yell. He didn't invoke an ancestral spirit. He didn't drop into a martial horse stance.
With the tired, fluid biomechanics of an off-duty millwright swatting an annoying horsefly off his toolbox with an oversized spanner, Austin flicked the five-foot blue pipe wrench upward into the path of the descending apocalypse.
The thirty-foot flaming hammer of imperial conquest slammed down.
The five-foot blue pipe wrench met it head-on.