Peeling a hard-boiled egg that radiated the thermal output of a foundry ladle took patience and a thick pair of leather gloves.
Austin used two flat flakes of slate like tongs, tapping the ruby mineral shell until it cracked. White steam hissed from the fractures with a high-pitched squeal, filling the cramped kitchen with the mouthwatering aroma of condensed proteins and ozone.
He popped the glowing golden yolk into his mouth.
It tasted like rich, salted butter laced with the crisp aftertaste of static electricity from a ninety-volt dry battery. The second it hit his gut, a warm wave washed out to his fingertips.
Austin swallowed, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and grabbed his iron hoe.
"Two iron nails and a kiln blueprint?" he muttered, stepping out onto the porch. "Now we're talking. Nails are gold on a remote site. You can't frame rafters with good intentions; you need real fasteners. If I can forge an eight-penny box nail, I can finally sister those rotted joists."
Out in the courtyard, Li Xiaoyao was still sweeping.
The kid looked like a man possessed. His eyes shone with feverish devotion; his breath came in steady, meditative huffs; and every stroke of his frayed bamboo broom sent faint ripples of golden mist drifting off the obsidian deck. For eighteen continuous hours, the boy had swept coordinate fourteen-eight, inadvertently breathing in the microscopic stellar radiation bleeding from the floorboards. The passive flux had burned through three stubborn meridian blockages in his chest that had been jammed shut since birth.
He was currently hovering a hair's breadth from breaking through to the Third Stage of Qi Condensation—a threshold that usually took outer disciples three bitter years of seated cultivation.
"Master!" Li Xiaoyao called out, dropping to one knee the second Austin appeared. "The sacred coordinate fourteen-eight is cleansed of mortal filth! Not a speck of earthly dust dares profane your altar!"
Austin glanced at the coordinate. Clean. Glossy as fresh lacquer.
"Good work," Austin said, nodding. "Take a breather, kid. Don't drain your NPC stamina bar. I'm heading down the southern ridge to clear some brush."
Li Xiaoyao trembled, bowing until his forehead almost touched the black glass. "May the Master's divine reaping shake the nine realms!"
"Yeah, sure. Keep an eye on the chickens," Austin called back over his shoulder. "If the golden hen drops another egg, leave it in the straw. Don't touch it barehanded unless you want your skin blistered to the bone."
***
The southern slope of Sunset Peak was a steep, jagged plunge of black shale and tangled briars that dropped sharply into an ancient, fog-choked gorge known throughout the sect as the Abyss of Despair.
For a thousand years, Clear Sky Sect disciples had been barred from setting foot on the ridge. Ancient sect records warned that during the Great Demonic Cataclysm, an Earth-Fiend Demon General had been subdued here by the Founding Patriarch himself, sealed beneath an indestructible thirty-foot monument of Heaven-Suppressing Soul Iron.
Austin, naturally, knew nothing about ancient cataclysms.
He just saw an ugly, overgrown bank of brush ruining his drainage line and choking the view.
`[Invasive Briars: 50+ clusters detected]` `[Terrain Clutter: Severe]`
Austin rested the ash haft on his shoulder, squinting at five hundred yards of dense, spiky brambles clinging to the forty-degree shale slope.
"Chipping through five hundred yards of brush with a hand hoe is an all-day job," Austin grumbled, spitting a speck of grit into the shale. "A contractor who doesn't use the right tool for site prep goes broke on labor. Where's the brush hog? Where's the propane weed burner?"
He closed his eyes, tapping his consciousness into the warm furnace spinning behind his navel.
The micro-plasma spark hummed happily, spinning at ten thousand Kelvin within its magnetic bottle. Austin opened his console overlay, finding a slider labeled `[THERMAL RADIATIVE APERTURE: 0.001% -> 0.05%]`.
"Just a quick throttle up," Austin whispered. "A controlled burn. Same as hitting weeds with a propane torch on a gravel drive."
He hauled the iron hoe back and shoved the blade forward like a surveyor's pole.
*WHUUUUUUUUM.*
It wasn't an open flame. It was an invisible, hemispherical shockwave of superheated thermonuclear air.
The pulse roared down the southern slope at eight hundred miles an hour.
Thousands of ironwood briars skipped burning entirely. In a microsecond, the stems and thorns disintegrated into invisible carbon vapor. The jagged shale cliffside flushed cherry-red, rippled like melted butter, and cooled against the mountain breeze into a seamless, mirror-smooth slide of vitrified black basalt running straight down into the gorge.
Two seconds flat. The entire hillside was as clean, slick, and level as a newly poured concrete spillway.
"That's site clearance," Austin smirked, pocketing the two iron nails. He tapped the heads together. Good ring. Stiff temper. "Proper tool for the job. Cuts eight hours of grubbing down to a single pass."
He turned to head back to the shack, but a deep, hydraulic groan shuddered through the rock under his sandals.
*CRACK.*
Right in the middle of the vitrified slide, a massive slab of dark stone that had been buried under a thousand years of roots was smoking in the heat. It was thirty feet tall, carved from pitch-black meteoric iron, and etched with crimson blood runes.
Or rather, it *had* been meteoric iron.
Under Austin's 10,000-degree thermal wave, the ancient, indestructible sealing stele had softened like tallow left on a hot engine block. The blood runes were sizzling into oily black steam, melting into runny puddles of lead.
*BOOM!*
The bedrock split wide. A jagged chasm tore through the basalt glass.
From the black depths of the gorge, a plume of suffocating demonic sulfur billowed into the sky, carrying the stench of rotten copper, burnt bone, and a thousand years of festering rage.
*"KAAA-HAHAHAHAHA!"*
A voice like grinding iron plates roared across the peaks, shaking pine needles from trees three miles away.
*"ONE THOUSAND YEARS! ONE THOUSAND YEARS SEALED BENEATH THE PATRIARCH'S BINDING!"*
A massive talon of obsidian bone and red magma surged out of the rift, gouging the basalt slide. A monstrous horned head with four burning crimson eyes pulled itself into the sunlight, its maw lined with serrated fangs dripping green venom that hissed against the stone.
*"CLEAR SKY DOGS! I, EARTH-FIEND GENERAL YAN JIAO, HAVE BROKEN THE HEAVEN-SUPPRESSING STELE! TODAY, I SHALL SLAUGHTER YOUR ELDERS, DRINK YOUR SECT MASTER'S BLOOD, AND CARVE MY THRONE FROM—"*
The demon's four burning eyes blinked.
Its jaw snapped shut.
The roar died in its throat.
Standing at the crest of the glass slide, five paces away, was Austin.
Austin was resting one hand on his rusty hoe, his brows knit in weary contractor annoyance.
To the demon, Austin didn't look like an outer disciple.
To the demon's ancient spiritual vision, the youth standing before it wasn't human at all. Deep within the mortal ribcage burned an **unshielded, roaring miniature star**—an ancient celestial furnace whose gravitational shear was bending the light around his shoulders. The ambient heat radiating from the boy was so savage that Yan Jiao's ancient obsidian horns were already softening, drooping down his temples like warm wax.
The venom dripping from the demon's fangs vaporized before it hit the basalt.
Its four crimson pupils shrank to pinpricks of pure, paralyzing cosmic horror.
*What... what is that?!* the ancient fiend's soul shrieked in mortal hysteria. *That is no cultivator! That is a first-dawn solar god from the First God Era! Why is an ancient star-emperor standing outside my tomb holding an agricultural tool?!*
Austin let out a heavy sigh, looking down at the giant horned creature.
"Great," Austin grumbled, waving the hoe dismissively at the demon's snout. "A subterranean mole. The collision mesh on this slope must have a gap in the geometry. Shoo! Get out of here! Pests ruin the drainage pitch and dig up the sub-base!"
The demon froze solid.
*He... he called me a mole...* the ancient terror shivered, its obsidian hide cracking under the crushing gravitational field. *He is mocking me! With a single breath, he could reduce my demon soul to subatomic ash! He is commanding me to crawl back into the dirt or face total annihilation!*
*"I OBEY! I OBEY THE SUN EMPEROR!"* the Earth-Fiend General wailed, weeping streaks of boiling sulfur.
With a frantic, desperate scramble of its massive claws, the ancient calamity shoved its horned head back down into the trench, grabbed the two edges of the cracked bedrock, and violently yanked the mountain closed over its own skull. It dug three thousand feet deeper into the earth's mantle, sealing the fissure from the inside with three layers of reinforced demonic warding.
Silence dropped over the ridge.
Only a thin curl of white steam rose from the sealed seam in the black glass.
Austin scratched his jaw with the hoe haft.
"Huh. Aggro dropped immediately," he muttered, shaking his head. "Weird mob AI. Usually burrowing pests try to bite your ankles. Oh well, saved me five points of tool durability."
He turned on his heel, whistling a dry tune as he trudged back up the hill.
***
Meanwhile, halfway up the southern mountain trail, Young Master Bai Chen, Senior Brother Shen, and twenty elite disciples of the Iron Sword Hall stood frozen like stone statues on the switchbacks.
They had heard the earth-splitting demonic roar that shook the valley.
They had smelled the suffocating thousand-year sulfur cloud.
And then, with their own ears, they had heard that ancient, apocalyptic horror scream *"I OBEY THE SUN EMPEROR!"* followed by the sound of a mountain-cleaving demon desperately burying itself alive in blind panic.
Senior Brother Shen, an early Foundation Establishment sword cultivator whose blade had never wavered in twenty mortal duels, looked down at his trembling hand.
Behind him, the twenty elite disciples were shaking so violently that the iron quarrels in their crossbow nocks clattered like dry corn in a bucket. One archer dropped his bow onto the shale, staring into the bamboo with eyes glazed by pure, paralyzing dread.
His fingers couldn't grip his scabbard. His knees were turning to jelly.
His face was as white as cold lard.
"Young... Young Master Bai," Senior Brother Shen whispered, his voice cracking like dry kindling. "Are... are you entirely certain that Chu Yuan is just an outer-sect cripple?"