The Grand Martial Arena of Canglan looked like somebody had taken a mining pick to the caldera of an extinct volcano, hollowed out the core, and lined the crater in black granite.
It was colossal, dark, and hot. Two hundred and fifty thousand spectators packed into steep, tiered stone benches that curved around a sunken, five-hundred-meter combat pit. Below, cyclopean basalt slabs formed the arena floor, ringed by twelve rune-etched formation pillars that hummed with enough warding magic to make Austin’s dental fillings tingle.
Way up on the southern lip of the caldera, jutting out over the drop on cantilevered white jade beams, sat the Supreme Imperial Royal Gallery.
The imperial ushers hadn't wanted to lead a man in blue denim overalls past the guards. But the Golden Edict tucked in Austin’s chest pocket bore the private wax seal of the Great Yan Crown Prince. That little disc of red wax turned the ushers’ knees to wet paper. Bowing so low their foreheads buffed the silk carpet runners, they guided Austin straight into the central box, seating him in an oversized rosewood armchair upholstered in gold velvet—barely six paces from the Provincial Governor’s carved throne.
Austin dropped into the chair with an appreciative grunt.
The cushions sank deep. He unnotched the bronze prong on his modular leather tool belt by two holes, settled his lower back against the lumbar roll, and hauled his steel-toed work boots up onto an intricately carved mahogany footstool.
He gave the footstool a firm downward bounce with his left heel.
"Solid joinery," Austin muttered, testing the play in the frame. "Mortise and tenon. Proper corner blocks screwed and glued underneath. You don't see that kind of cross-bracing in modern flat-pack junk."
Down around his scuffed leather toe caps, twelve grey river pebbles and thirty dried pine needles drifted in clean, silent loops. Orbiting at three revolutions per minute. Perfectly flat. Completely indifferent to the thin mountain air and the ambient spiritual pressure radiating off fifty imperial bodyguards.
To his right, Li Xiaoyao sat perched on the extreme front lip of an embroidered satin stool. The kid looked like someone had run an iron rebar straight up his spine. His knuckles were pale from clutching Austin’s leather blueprint tube against his ribs, his wide eyes darting between the halberds of the Golden Core palace guard.
At Austin’s boots, Cerberus Pug lay flat across a golden tiger-skin rug, sprawling out like an eight-hundred-pound hearth rug made of volcanic slate.
Pug was having the time of his three lives. A young imperial page, trembling so hard his silk tunic rustled like dried corn husks, knelt on the floor balancing an enormous silver platter stacked with braised spirit-ox ribs. Pug’s three heads worked in smooth, uninterrupted rhythm: left head sniped a rib, middle head took two, right head snagged a fat marrow bone. Then a three-way crunch, a synchronized swallow, and a deep, guttural bass purr that shook the silver goblets on the side table.
Austin reached into his canvas shoulder pack, hauled out his cedar bento box, and fished out another hard-boiled solar egg.
He rapped it against the rosewood armrest.
*CRACK.*
"Decent box seats," Austin said around a mouthful of warm, golden yolk, gesturing with his peeled egg toward the yawning stone pit below. "Unobstructed line of sight to the work zone. Good natural acoustics bouncing off the caldera walls. But the egress architecture is an absolute death trap."
Xiaoyao blinked, tearing his gaze away from a terrifyingly tall palace captain. "Egress, Patriarch?"
"Exit routing," Austin said, chewing methodically. "Look at the perimeter gangways. Two hundred and fifty thousand warm bodies, and the whole stadium funnels into eight four-meter stairwells. If a fire breaks out or some rogue sect elder detonates his core down in the sand, you've got an immediate class-four crush bottleneck. People will get trampled ten deep on those landings. Zero illuminated exit signs, zero emergency sprinkler pipes, and the stair treads don't even have anti-slip grooving. City inspector must've taken a massive kickback to sign off on this build."
Xiaoyao nodded with earnest terror, soaking in the words like sacred gospel. "The Patriarch's foresight penetrates the darkest schemes of mortal builders!"
Before Austin could explain standard municipal stair riser ratios, a roar like an avalanche hit the caldera.
A quarter-million voices surged in a wave of raw, deafening cheer.
Provincial Governor Zhao had just risen from his throne.
Zhao looked every inch the Late Golden Core bureaucrat-warlord. He was broad-shouldered and tall, clad in heavy midnight-blue silk brocade embroidered with nine coiling river dragons whose seed-pearl eyes caught the afternoon sun. He carried a century of imperial command in the set of his jaw and the cold squint of his eyes.
The Governor raised both palms, pressing downward against the air.
A heavy, suffocating wave of Golden Core aura rolled outward, crushing the arena's ambient noise into dead silence. Two hundred and fifty thousand spectators swallowed their breath at once.
Governor Zhao cleared his throat, tapped a bronze resonance array set into the balustrade, and began his address.
He started with the founding of the Great Yan Dynasty three millennia ago. He worked through the lineages of twelve founding emperors, naming their consorts, their auspicious birthmarks, and the precise weight of their jade seals. Then came eighty-four ancestral field marshals, complete with their tactical maneuvers in the northern passes. From there, he launched into a forty-minute philosophical meditation on the five elemental phases of provincial soil nutrition, followed by an exhaustive breakdown of moral duty between imperial tax collectors and filial sons.
Down on the competitor’s lower terrace, five hundred sect prodigies and guild champions stood locked in parade rest under the blistering sun. Sweat dripped from their chins, but their expressions remained rigid with reverent awe.
Up in the royal box, Austin’s brain felt like it was turning into cold oatmeal.
His eyes drifted out of focus. His jaw slackened.
*PING.*
A translucent blue window popped up directly in front of his eyes, framing Governor Zhao’s moving mouth with clean system lines:
Austin’s left eye gave a spastic, involuntary twitch.
"An hour and thirty-eight minutes..." he groaned, dropping his forehead into his hand. "An un-skippable ninety-minute lore dump. Why does every developer think players want an audio tour of their high-school fantasy notebook? Nobody cares about the eighty-four marshals, Zhao. Give me the quest marker, hand over the loot table, and let me get back to my lathe."
He reached into the bento box, pulled out his third solar egg, and gave it another hard rap against the lacquered armrest.
*CRACK.*
The brittle pop carried through the hushed silence of the royal gallery like a pistol shot.
Thirty yards down and to the left, on the open competitor terrace, a young man was clenching his fists hard enough to draw blood.
Young Master Huo Yun, first sword of the Blazing Sun Sect.
Huo Yun wore scarlet robes lined with genuine golden phoenix down, held together by a fire-jade clasp that pulsed with heat. At twenty-two, he had already rammed through to Peak Foundation. The mid-tier Earth-Grade Blazing Dragon Sword slung across his back leaked tendrils of crimson flame that scorched the sand near his boots. In the betting parlors outside the South Gate, bookies weren't even taking bets on him losing; they were taking bets on how many seconds his opponents would survive.
For twenty straight minutes, Huo Yun hadn't registered a solitary syllable about the eighty-four marshals.
His bloodshot eyes were drilled into the royal gallery.
*Who is that filthy ditch-digger?!* Huo Yun screamed in the silence of his skull, grinding his molars until his jaw ached.
*He's wearing frayed dungarees. He's got a yellow crayon stuck over his ear. He's wearing an inverted blue plastic washbasin strapped to his head with nylon web. And he's resting his greasy, mud-caked boots on the Sovereign Governor's imported mahogany stool... peeling boiled eggs while our Lord speaks of the Celestial Mandate?!*
Huo Yun watched, trembling with pure, aristocratic rage, as Austin picked off a fleck of white shell, popped half the egg into his mouth, and washed it down with a pull from an uninsulated tin thermos.
*Insolent, low-born parasite,* Huo Yun swore, spiritual fire rippling beneath his fingernails. *When the dueling brackets are drawn, I won't just defeat you. I'll roast those ridiculous blue overalls into charcoal and scatter your grease pencil into the ash heap!*
Up at the balustrade, Governor Zhao’s chest swelled as he reached the theatrical summit of his speech, his robes snapping in a sudden draft of golden spiritual wind:
*"...AND BY THE SACRED FIRE OF OUR ANCESTORS AND THE ETERNAL BLADE OF THE GREAT YAN, LET THE CENTENNIAL GRAND TOURNAMENT COMMENCE!"*
*BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!*
Eighty-one dragon-fire cannons roared along the rim of the caldera. Crimson and gold smoke billowed hundreds of feet into the blue noon sky, swallowed instantly by the bellow of two hundred and fifty thousand spectators stamping their feet until the black granite tiers vibrated like drums.
Before the smoke could clear the caldera rim, a black iron shape plummeted from the referee platform, dropping into the pit like a falling boulder.
*KABOOOOOM!*
The Chief Arbiter hit the basalt flags with an impact that cracked the surface stone into a spiderweb of grey dust.
Arbiter Tie stood up. Six foot six. Scars across his bald scalp thick as bootlaces. Heavy black-iron lamellar plates strapped over shoulders the width of an oak beam. In his right fist, he held an eight-foot iron referee's staff capped with heavy brass rings.
He drove the staff into the stone with a deafening ring:
*"ALL REGISTERED COMPETITORS, DOWN TO THE LOWER STAGING PLAZA!*
*"THE PRELIMINARY TRIAL COMMENCES FORTHWITH: THE HEAVEN-MEASURING SPIRIT PILLAR!*
*"EACH CONTESTANT GETS ONE STRIKE! MAXIMUM FORCE! FIVE THOUSAND POINTS SECURES A BRACKET SEED! UNDER FIVE THOUSAND, PACK YOUR BAGS AND CLEAR THE PIT!"*
Up in the royal gallery, Austin brushed three yellow crumbs off the bib of his dungarees.
He swung his boots off the footstool, stretched his arms until his shoulder joints gave a satisfying pop, and rose from the velvet chair. He reached behind his right hip, uncoupling his five-foot, iridescent blue Stellar-Steel pipe wrench from its magnetic belt hook. The tool swung into his hand with twenty pounds of dense, satisfying heft.
"Finally," Austin said, rolling his neck. "Cutscene's over. Let's go see what kind of high score this carnival bell-ringer is calibrated for."