Table Ninety-Four sat tucked into the far northern corner of the outer pavilion courtyard.
Behind it ran an ancient, mossy retaining wall of dressed basalt. To the left lay a flagstone drainage ditch choked with wild dandelion, and twenty yards to the right stood the timber shed where the pavilion groundskeepers sorted scrap lumber and spent charcoal.
To an aristocratic cultivator obsessed with face and imperial prestige, the location was an insult.
To Austin, it was prime real estate.
"Look at this staging clearance," Austin said, setting his rigid birchwood clipboard down on the raw pine boards. "Ten meters of open buffer on every flank. Zero silk curtains flapping in the breeze to mess with sightlines. Solid flagstone footer under the legs. Rough-sawn yellow pine table with mortise-and-tenon joints—simple, sturdy, no veneer peeling in the sun."
He pulled a four-inch aluminum torpedo level from his leather tool belt, setting it dead-center across the planks. The green vial’s bubble floated two millimeters to the left. Austin reached into his dungaree pocket, pulled out a tapered cedar shim, and kicked it under the northwest table leg with his steel toe.
The green bubble drifted back, locking dead-center between the black witness lines.
"Zero-bubble level," Austin muttered with deep, soulful satisfaction. "Can't do precision metallurgy on a wobbly deck."
Li Xiaoyao unhitched the two pack-mules, looping their lead ropes loosely through an iron mooring ring set into the retaining wall. The beasts immediately dropped their heads to crop wild clover along the ditch, ears flicking away the summer heat.
Beside the table, Pug curled his eight-hundred-pound frame against the sun-warmed basalt blocks. The Cerberus rested all three heads across his thick paws. Ruby eyes drifted shut, and a deep, rhythmic snore began to rumble through his chest like distant thunder over a dry valley.
Austin unhooked a lint-free microfiber rag from his belt, wiping the tabletop clean of pine needles and wind-blown grit.
Then he stepped over to the lead mule's pack saddle.
He popped the heavy bronze clasps on the first cedar crate, lifted the lid, and set aside the excelsior straw packing. Reaching inside, he hoisted four rectangular, twenty-pound ingots of Tier 4 **Stellar-Steel**.
The blocks were brutally plain.
Every edge was true. Machine-milled forty-five-degree chamfers met at crisp ninety-degree corners with zero tear-out and zero burrs. No gilded dragons crawled along the flats. No spirit rubies pulsed with gaudy light. No immortal talismans had been brushed onto the faces. They were solid, iridescent sapphire ingots that drank the midday sun, refracting the light into a quiet, hypnotic violet sheen.
Austin stacked them neatly in the center of the pine table: three on the bottom course, one centered on top, forming a compact, gleaming pyramid.
Beside the pyramid, he laid his five-foot blue pipe wrench across a thick roll of parchment schematics to keep the mountain draft from blowing them away.
Next came the marketing. Austin pulled a scrap of brown corrugated cardboard from his canvas pack, drew his yellow lumber grease pencil from behind his ear, and lettered his signboard with clean, mechanical block print:
Austin secured the cardboard to the front lip of the pine table with three copper upholstery tacks, driving them flush with the flat side of his pipe wrench.
He sat down on the bench, stretched his legs, and reached into his pack for lunch. He pulled out a hard-boiled solar egg, tapped the speckled shell against the edge of the table, peeled it clean, and took a hearty bite.
At neighboring Table Ninety-Three, three young master blacksmiths from the **Silver-Hammer Sect** were fussing over their own centerpiece: an eight-foot ceremonial halberd forged from Crimson-Fire Silver. The weapon was encrusted with forty-nine fire-spirit rubies, wrapped in silver filigree, and draped with long red silk tassels.
The lead disciple, a youth named Lu Chen in shimmering silver brocade, glanced over at Austin’s table and burst into a loud, braying laugh:
"Look at this ditch-digger! He dragged four blue paving bricks to the Imperial Artisan Expo!"
"No runic arrays? No gemstone sockets?" another disciple sneered, waving an ivory folding fan. "They look like salvage doorstops from a torn-down warehouse! And read that ridiculous scribbling on the cardboard—'Hydraulic Ram Schematics'? 'Viton O-Ring Formulas'? What kind of illiterate barbarian jargon is that?!"
Lu Chen sauntered over, leaning one hand against Austin’s table with an arrogant smirk. "Hey, grease-monkey. If you’re trying to hawk scrap metal in Canglan, you should pay an engraver five coppers to etch a fake dragon on the side. Imperial buyers don't touch raw pig-iron without spiritual glitter."
Austin chewed his egg, swallowed, and picked up his dented thermos. He took a sip of hot jasmine tea, steam rising past his safety glasses.
"Glitter doesn't increase tensile yield, bub," Austin said flatly. "Those forty-nine rubies on your shaft create stress concentration notches every three inches along the load path. First time someone blocks an overhead strike with that toy, the shaft shears clean in two. You didn't build a polearm; you built a decorative floor lamp."
Lu Chen’s face went scarlet. "You insolent hound—!"
Before Lu Chen could reach for his tassels, a murmur rippled through the courtyard archway.
Walking into the sunlight was an elderly gentleman flanked by four senior imperial chamberlains.
He wore robes of midnight-black silk embroidered with the seven-star constellation crest of the Imperial Artisan Guild.
It was **Grandmaster Ouyang**, Chief Metallurgical Inspector of the Great Yan Dynasty and the undisputed authority on sacred alloys in the northern territories. A Peak Golden Core elder who had spent three centuries appraising ancient relics, Ouyang was the lead judge of the Centennial Expo.
He was currently rubbing his temples, fighting a vicious tension headache. He’d just spent four agonizing hours inside the main hall, inspecting hundreds of flashy, structurally incompetent spirit weapons hauled in by arrogant sect heirs.
"Useless junk," Ouyang grumbled to his aides, his voice raspy with disgust. "Every young blacksmith in this province simply glues twenty fire gems onto brittle cold-iron and names it the 'Nine-Heaven Dragon Cleaver.' Zero crystalline alignment! Zero grain boundary control! They don't understand smelting; they run a jewelry boutique!"
Ouyang took a deep gulp of the crisp courtyard breeze, desperate to clear the smell of burnt incense from his sinuses.
Then his boots froze against the flagstones.
His stride snapped shut.
His Peak Golden Core divine sense—sharpened by three hundred years of working with divine ores—caught an anomaly in the ambient qi.
It wasn't a flare of flame. It wasn't an arc of lightning.
A dense, cold gravitational knot warped the surrounding space, radiating a crystalline lattice so tightly ordered, so massively dense, and so cosmically foreign that his spiritual sea recoiled in shock!
Ouyang’s head whipped toward the dumpster shed.
His eyes locked onto Table Ninety-Four.
More precisely, his gaze pinned the four plain blue blocks stacked on the weathered pine.
Ouyang’s spirit-crystal monocle popped from his eye, dangling forgotten against his silk chest on its golden thread. His jaw hung open. His breath seized in his throat.
"That... by the ancestors..." Ouyang rasped, voice trembling so violently his attendants reached out to steady him. "That sapphire luster... zero surface diffuse scatter... it’s bending ambient light around the chamfers..."
Ouyang shoved his chamberlains aside, sprinting across the courtyard gravel with the desperate frenzy of a man fleeing a collapsing tunnel!
He skidded to a halt before Table Ninety-Four, boots spraying dust. He leaned forward, hands hovering six inches over the blue pyramid, fingers twitching like he was staring into an open furnace.
"May I... by the Heavens above, young man, may I test this material?!" Ouyang gasped, face drained of all color.
Austin took another bite of his solar egg and nodded casually. "Go ahead. Hardness rating is off the charts, but feel free to do a scratch test. Just don't nick my cardboard sign."
Grandmaster Ouyang reached into his spatial ring.
With shaking fingers, he withdrew the ultimate testing implement of the Imperial Guild: the **Sacred Dragon-Tooth Diamond Chisel**. Carved from the fossilized fang of an ancient void-dragon, the implement was theoretically unbreakable, used solely to grade Heaven-Tier divine ores.
Ouyang circulated his full Peak Golden Core cultivation!
Spiritual flames roared along his forearms, scorching the air with crimson heat. Gritting his teeth with a feral roar, Ouyang brought the diamond chisel down against the corner of the top ingot with the full kinetic fury of a mountain-cleaving strike!
*CLAAAAAAANG!*
A deafening acoustic shockwave erupted through the northern yard!
The concussive boom blasted outward, shattering every porcelain teacup and water pitcher at neighboring Table Ninety-Three! Young Master Lu Chen and his two disciples were blown off their wooden stools, tumbling ass-over-tea-kettle into the dandelion ditch!
Grandmaster Ouyang was hurled back three full paces, his arms going numb to the shoulders as bone-jarring recoil tore through his meridians!
The concussive shockwave woke Cerberus Pug with a start. The eight-hundred-pound hound scrambled up, all three heads blinking in irritation as a cloud of fine white diamond dust drifted past his snouts. Pug snorted, sneezed three times in rapid succession, and glared at the trembling old man with deep canine resentment. He let out a low, vibrating rumble that made the retaining wall shudder, shook the dust off his glossy black hide, and circled twice before flopping heavily back down onto his paws.
Ouyang looked down at his shaking right hand.
The Sacred Dragon-Tooth Diamond Chisel—the three-hundred-year-old heirloom of the Imperial Guild—had ceased to exist. Only the cracked silver hilt remained in his blistered palm. The void-dragon tooth had dissolved into powdered sugar, sparkling innocently in the afternoon breeze.
Ouyang looked back at the blue ingot.
The chamfer stayed crisp as a fresh razor. The mirror face gleamed under the noon sun without a scratch, a dent, or a smudge.
The block sat there, immovably dense, radiating the quiet, terrifying permanence of a condensed stellar core.
Grandmaster Ouyang’s knees gave out.
*THUD.*
The Chief Metallurgical Inspector of the Great Yan Dynasty dropped onto both knees in the dirt.
His trembling eyes traveled from the pristine sapphire metal down to the crude cardboard sign tacked to the pine: *[STELLAR-STEEL ALLOY SAMPLES - WANTED: PNEUMATIC PISTON SEALS & O-RING FORMULAS]*.
Ouyang threw his head back and screamed into the sky at the top of his lungs, his voice echoing across the entire citadel:
*"GUARDS! GUARDS! SEAL THE PALACE DISTRICT! RING THE NINE-DRAGON CHIMES! BRING THE PROVINCIAL GOVERNOR! SUMMON THE ENTIRE GUILD COUNCIL! THE SACRED CELESTIAL ALLOY HAS DESCENDED UPON TABLE NINETY-FOUR!"*