Sixty seconds after Grandmaster Ouyang’s voice cracked in a strangled shriek, the damp dumpster corner around Table Ninety-Four turned into a churning, purple-robed riot.
The ground groaned. A low, rhythmic shudder rattled the cobblestones like a runaway quarry cart loaded with scrap iron. Three thousand grandmaster blacksmiths, sect elders, merchant barons, royal princelings, and Imperial Academy scholars came stampeding through the narrow garden archways at a dead sprint.
Dignity died first. Propriety followed three strides later. Three centuries of solemn Daoist composure ended up ground straight into the mud alongside the municipal chrysanthemum beds. Flying swords smacked together in mid-air, throwing showers of white-hot sparks into the canvas awnings. Jade belt pendants snapped off silk sashes and rolled underfoot. Embroidered sleeves ripped at the armpits as grey-bearded patriarchs threw Foundation-level elbow checks to claw past their lifelong colleagues.
Two alleys over, spice peddlers were already choking on airborne ghost-chili dust kicked up by the rush. Half-rotted cedar market stalls groaned under the wash of spiritual wind. Decades of weathered lime mortar flaked out of the perimeter wall’s expansion joints, raining fine white chalk over trampled turnip carts and startled pack goats.
Nobody cared. The entire artisan quarter had lost its collective mind.
"CLEAR THE LANE! THE HEAVENLY SWORD SECT OFFERS FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND HIGH-GRADE SPIRIT STONES FOR THE CORNER INGOT!"
"OUT OF THE PATH, JUNIOR! THE CROWNING SUN CARAVAN BIDS THREE ANCIENT SPIRIT VEINS AND A SQUADRON OF THIRTY CLOUD BARGES!"
"TEN MILLION HIGH-GRADE STONES! A DOZEN PRIVATE ISLANDS IN THE SOUTHERN SEAS! NAME YOUR TRIBUTE, PATRIARCH!"
"THE SEVEN-STAR PAVILION OFFERS TWO UNTOUCHED SPIRIT MINES AND AN IMPERIAL CHEST OF NINE-CYCLE TRIBULATION ELIXIRS!"
Men whose names could silence entire prefectures were hip-checking each other like dockworkers scrambling for day-labor chits at dawn. Embroidered spatial pouches whipped through the air on severed cords. Brass-bound iron trunks full of mint-stamped jade coins hit the flagstones with heavy, bone-rattling clatters. Mineral deeds printed on gold foil fluttered overhead like confetti in a gale. A swirling blizzard of raw golden qi, unspent pride, and desperate greed choked the alleyway until the air smelled like scorched copper.
Behind Table Ninety-Four, perched on an overturned pine crate, Austin took another slow bite of his hard-boiled solar egg.
Down by his scarred work boots, twelve smooth grey pebbles and thirty dried pine needles kept right on tracking their frictionless planetary orbits. Three revolutions per minute. Perfectly flat. The hurricane of Golden Core spiritual pressure washing over the perimeter fence didn't disturb their orbital planes by a hair.
Austin chewed, swallowed with a dry gulp, and picked up his yellow lumber grease pencil. He reached forward and rapped the crude cardboard sign nailed to the front apron of the plank table.
*TAP. TAP. TAP.*
The sound was tiny, dry, and flat. Yet it sliced straight through the roaring bedlam with the cold, unyielding clarity of a drop-forged steel wedge hitting an anvil.
"Hey," Austin called out. "Any of you boys ever learn to read basic municipal signage?"
The shouting hitched. A collective stammer caught in three thousand throats. High-stage cultivators froze mid-shove, chests heaving, beards tangled with sweat, glaring in red-eyed confusion at the young laborer sitting in grease-stained denim.
Austin leveled the blunt eraser end of his grease pencil right at the cardboard:
"The trade specs are posted right here in twenty-four-point yellow lumber wax: **NO CASH. NO SPIRIT SWORDS. BLUEPRINTS ONLY.**"
He took a breath, letting his voice carry across the sea of silk and gold wire.
"I don't take spirit stones. That stuff is speculative fiat currency with zero intrinsic utility and twenty percent annual volatility depending on which mountain mine collapses next. I don't want your flying cloud boats, either. Half of them are framed out in un-seasoned green timber, held together with spit and bailing wire, and the dry-rot maintenance overhead alone is an absolute insurance nightmare. And keep your ancestral mirrors. I've got an entire bedrock quarry of this blue alloy sitting back home on Sunset Peak. What I need are high-pressure hydraulic ram pump schematics, double-acting pneumatic cylinder blueprints, and precision gear-hobbing tolerance manuals. You got paper with clean orthogonal projections, we talk. You got shiny rocks, step out of the queue."
A thick, suffocating silence dropped over the courtyard.
Elders traded paralyzed glances. Several patriarchs poked at their ear canals with jade-tipped fingers, convinced their eardrums had suffered acoustic trauma from Ouyang’s opening shriek.
*No gold? No spirit stones? He rejects thirty cloud ships and ancestral heavenly mirrors... for ditch-digging water pump drawings?!*
"Is this boy entirely touched in the head?!" a white-bearded elder of the Heavenly Sword Sect sputtered, his lower lip quivering with outrage. "Four blocks of pristine Cosmic Star-Steel—the divine star-core alloy sung of in primeval sutras, capable of cleaving heavens and sundering worlds—and he barters it for peasant drainage doodles?!"
"Blasphemy!" a guild smith cried, tearing at his topknot. "Trading celestial bones for ditch-clearing pamphlets! Has the realm gone stone-blind?!"
"I'VE GOT 'EM!"
A ragged, gravel-choked yell tore through the back of the mob.
"OUT OF MY WAY, YOU WINDBAGS! MOVE ASIDE!"
Plowing through the sea of pristine imperial silk came an old man with the frantic, wild-eyed momentum of a loose flywheel.
His ash-streaked gray linen robes looked like they had been soaked in mineral oil and dried over a coal forge three decades ago. Wild tufts of white hair stood out from his temples like wire brushes charged with static. He smelled overpoweringly of tallow, sulfur, pine rosin, and oxidized gear grease. Clutched under his left arm was a heavy, dented bronze drafting tube, its threads crusty with green verdigris.
It was Master Tang.
Fifty years prior, Tang had been tossed out on his ear as chief mechanic of the Imperial Machine Division. While the rest of the capital’s smiths were busy etching fire runes onto broadswords, Tang had spent his prime dismantling First Epoch clockwork automata and drafting pressure-vessel wall profiles. The Imperial Academy called his work godless mortal rubbish, cancelled his stipend, and shoved him into a drafty canal-side shed with leaky rafters.
Tang stumbled forward, boots catching on an abandoned jade coin chest, and threw his ribs against the pine edge of Table Ninety-Four. He was wheezing like a cracked bellows. Sweat had cut two clean grey rivers through the soot on his cheeks.
He slammed the bronze cylinder down on the boards with a dull *thud*.
"I have them, Foreman! By the ancestors' rusty gears, I have them!" Tang gasped, spraying flecks of grey spit. "Dug out of the iron vaults beneath the Northern Desolation forty years back! The Academy elders called it heretical mortal scrap. Said it was useless junk because it's got zero sword chants, zero spirit runes, not even a scrap of dragon script! Said it was the scribbles of blind ditch-diggers!"
Tang’s knuckles were black with carbon. He spun the bronze end-cap with trembling, calloused fingers and slid out a fat, heavy roll of amber-tinted vellum.
Hands shaking, he rolled the sheet across the pine planks, weighting the corners down with two heavy iron flange nuts he pulled from his grease-stained smock.
Austin nudged his spectacles up his nose and leaned in.
The second his gaze locked onto the ink lines, his HUD flared to life, casting crisp green vector meshes and stress matrices across his retinas.
Austin’s eyebrows climbed straight toward his hard hat’s brim.
His thumb traced the crisp, uniform cross-hatching of the cylinder housing. Every projection was clean. Section views included callouts for cylinder bore micro-honing, dynamic piston clearance, and gland dimensions for elastomer wiper seals.
A quiet, wide grin broke across his face—the deep, quiet satisfaction of a sandbox survival player who had just cracked open heavy metallurgy and automated hydraulic logistics in a single click.
"Look at that chamfer callout," Austin whispered, his voice tinged with honest reverence. "Dual elastomer wiper glands. Double-acting ram built for a five-hundred-bar continuous duty cycle. And these gear profiles—standard twenty-degree pressure angle with matching diametral pitch. No guesswork. No mystic mumbo-jumbo. Just clean, honest engineering."
He looked up at the trembling, soot-stained old mechanic.
"Done," Austin said. "Deal's closed."
He glanced back toward Li Xiaoyao, who was guarding the pack-mules with chest puffed out like a bantam rooster.
"Xiaoyao. Grab two burlap grain sacks. Wrap two of the Tier 4 Stellar-Steel bars snug. Pass them over to Master Tang here. Make sure he takes the load with both hands tucked under the center of mass—each ingot is twenty pounds of condensed stellar core. Don't let him drop forty pounds of degenerate mass on his instep."
"Understood, Patriarch!" Xiaoyao barked.
Moving with disciplined precision, the boy hoisted two deep-blue ingots from the top of the pyramid. He bundled them tight in rough hemp sacking, knotting the corners, and eased the dense weight directly into Master Tang’s waiting palms.
Tang caught the mass. His knees buckled instantly. The shocking density nearly dragged his chin into the dirt, but he locked his elbows, hauled the bundled alloy against his chest, and burst into raw, unashamed sobs. He buried his nose right into the scratchy hemp, weeping like a man who had found water after thirty years in the salt flats.
"The machine path..." Tang wept, tears washing down into his beard. "It works. It's real. The ancients knew... true precision outlasts the vanity of the blade..."
Behind him, three thousand cultivators emitted a synchronized, chest-hollowing groan of pure existential defeat.
*"Two entire bars of cosmic metal... swapped for shop rags and scrap parchment!"*
*"If I'd known, I would have put a torch to my clan’s scriptorium and scavenged every storm drain in the province for water pipe sketches!"*
*"Heavenly ancestors weep! Two divine ingots handed to an old madman who sleeps on a pile of rusted spanners!"*
Austin ignored the groaning crowd. He rolled the First Epoch vellum with patient care, slipped the roll into his reinforced leather blueprint tube, and threaded the brass cap home until it seated with a solid, airtight *snick*.
"That," Austin said, slapping the dust off his denim knees, "is a top-tier vendor haul. The minute we drag the mules back to Sunset Peak, Floor Two gets an automated fifty-ton hydraulic press. We're gonna stamp out boiler plate by the truckload."
Before the mob of elders could surge forward with fresh bids of ancestral lands or marriage contracts, a harsh brass fanfare cut through the valley air from the high palace ramparts.
*BHOOOOOO-BHOOOOOO——!*
Nine colossal dragon-mouth acoustic horns blared in unison from the battlements, rattling the roof tiles across the entire capital district:
*"BY SOVEREIGN DECREE OF PROVINCIAL GOVERNOR ZHAO!*
*"THE CENTENNIAL GRAND TOURNAMENT OF CANGLAN HAS COMMENCED!*
*"ALL REGISTERED SECTS, LICENSED GUILDS, AND SANCTIONED APPLICANTS, REPORT FORTHWITH TO THE GRAND MARTIAL ARENA FOR OPENING FORMALITIES AND THE PRELIMINARY TEST!"*
Austin turned his head, squinting toward the massive obsidian colosseum jutting out of the extinct volcanic ridge above the upper wards. Its cyclopean buttresses leaned dark and heavy against the sky.
He gave his hard hat a tug, checking that the nylon chinstrap was snugged up right. He adjusted his pack straps, scratched Pug behind his middle collar, and jerked his chin toward Xiaoyao.
"Opening ceremonies," Austin said, checking his HUD quest clock. "Let's go see what kind of event bounties and carnival minigames they've got lined up."