Right in the bullseye of the five-hundred-meter combat pit stood the most revered diagnostic monument of the Great Yan Dynasty: the **Heaven-Measuring Spirit Pillar**.
It was a sixty-foot obelisk quarried from a seamless monolithic vein of ancient Nether-Obsidian, five feet square at the plinth. Up its dark vertical face ran ten thousand inlaid runes of liquid alchemical gold. Three thousand years ago, the first imperial grand court had calibrated the array to gauge raw kinetic impulse, structural momentum, and spiritual core density.
One thousand points cleared the bar for a respectable Foundation Establishment cultivator.
Five thousand punch-listed an applicant into the official sixty-four-slot tournament bracket.
Eight thousand was legendary territory—the domain of imperial vanguard generals, siege commanders, and ancient sect patriarchs who ate iron ore for breakfast.
Down on the churned silica floor, Arbiter Tie held his heavy brass ledger open with one gauntleted fist. His gravelly bellow rattled the acoustic spires:
"First contestant! Step to the chalk!"
An outer disciple from the Iron-Palm Sect shuffled up to the line. He dropped into a deep, theatrical horse stance, slapped his thighs, and roared until the neck veins on his throat looked like knotted hemp rope. His right palm flared violet with crackling thunder-qi, and he slammed it into the obsidian plinth with a wet, heavy crack!
*THUD!*
The liquid gold runes surged up the obelisk face like heated mercury in a glass barometer: *1,000... 2,400... 3,800... 4,200!*
"Four thousand two hundred points! DISQUALIFIED!" Arbiter Tie barked, thumbing the page without glancing up. "Clear the line! Next!"
Over the following hour, eighty young masters took their swings. Most landed square in the three-to-four-thousand trough, slinking back to the staging benches with their heads down. A handful of sect heirs managed fifty-four hundred or five thousand eight hundred, drawing polite applause from their respective sect elders in the upper tiers.
Then the whole caldera shook with a sudden, deafening chant.
"HUO YUN! HUO YUN! THE BLAZING DRAGON OF CANGLAN!"
Stepping through the competitor archway onto the sands came Young Master Huo Yun. His scarlet phoenix robes billowed behind him on a hot thermal updraft, his long black topknot bound in a crown of polished fire-jade.
In his right grip, he drew the **Blazing Dragon Sword**.
The mid-tier Earth-Grade blade caught the sunlight and erupted into curling tongues of crimson spiritual fire. Superheated air boiled off the steel, sending undulating heat ripples across the basalt pit that warped the view of the grandstands. Up in the betting boxes, runners were frantically slashing the championship payout to even money.
Huo Yun strutted past Austin, pausing just long enough to drop his chin and rake Austin’s overalls with a sneer of pure, aristocratic distaste.
"Watch closely, peasant," Huo Yun hissed, smoke trailing from his teeth. "Take a good look at true celestial power before you go scratching that sacred stone with your rusted sewer pipe."
Huo Yun didn't wait for an answer. He coiled his thighs and vaulted twenty feet into the air.
His Peak Foundation cultivation flared like an open furnace flue. Above his shoulders, a thirty-foot phantom of an ancient crimson fire dragon took shape, its fiery coils wrapping along the length of his blade with a high-pitched, whistling shriek!
*"BLAZING DRAGON HEAVEN-SEVERING STRIKE!"*
Huo Yun brought the flaming broadsword down like a falling thunderbolt.
*BOOOOOOOOOOM!*
A concussive blast of fire and shockwaves swallowed the bottom third of the pillar. The arena floor shuddered down to its volcanic roots. Scorched silica grit sprayed across the first four rows of spectator benches, sending court scribes scrambling to cover their inkpots.
When the red smoke drifted clear, the golden runes were tearing up the vertical scale:
*5,000... 6,800... 7,900... 8,300... 8,850!*
*DING-DING-DING-DING!*
"EIGHT THOUSAND EIGHT HUNDRED AND FIFTY POINTS!" Arbiter Tie bellowed into his brass horn, his scarred face flushing deep purple. "A NEW PROVINCIAL CENTENNIAL RECORD FOR APPLICANTS UNDER THIRTY YEARS OF AGE!"
Two hundred and fifty thousand people erupted into a standing roar. Scarlet banners snapped in the hot wind. Huo Yun slid his smoking blade back into its scabbard with a theatrical, one-handed flick, casting a haughty, sidelong glance toward the Provincial Governor's gallery.
"Next applicant!" Arbiter Tie barked, squinting at his wooden registration slate with a puzzled grunt. "...Contestant Austin of 'Sunset Peak Fabrication & Maintenance LLC'!"
The roaring grandstands choked off into bewildered murmurs.
*"Sunset Peak Fabrication?"* an elder in the fourth tier mumbled, twisting his beard hairs between two fingers. *"What demonic lineage is this? What does 'LLC' stand for? Is 'Limited Liability' some primeval blood oath to cap their karmic liability before the Heavenly Dao?!"*
Austin ambled down the wide stone steps into the pit.
He took his time. Easy contractor pace. Blue denim dungarees, oil-tanned leather tool bags slung across his hips, scuffed steel-toed boots kicking up small puffs of crushed volcanic sand. His midnight-blue hard hat sat squared over his brow, the bill pulled low against the midday sun.
Resting over his right shoulder was his five-foot, deep-blue Stellar-Steel pipe wrench.
Down by his work boots, twelve smooth grey river pebbles and thirty dried pine needles traced their frictionless, gravitational loops: *Spin... spin... spin...*
Austin walked straight up to the sixty-foot obelisk and stopped at the chalk line.
He didn't square his hips. He didn't drop into a horse stance.
He tilted his head back, adjusted his wire-rimmed spectacles, and let his HUD interface ping the pillar from base to capstone.
Austin sighed through his nose, shaking his head with the tired, bone-deep sorrow of an industrial millwright inspecting a carnival high-striker held together with duct tape and rusted baling wire.
"Piezo-electric quartz crystal," Austin muttered, clicking his tongue. "Hasn't seen a calibration tech in three thousand years. Zero-point drift is sitting at forty-two percent. And this obsidian casing is completely un-annealed. Sixty vertical feet of brittle volcanic glass, baked by the sun every afternoon and chilled down to freezing every night. It's basically a giant, pre-stressed Prince Rupert’s drop waiting for an excuse to disintegrate."
Twenty paces away, arms crossed over his chest, Huo Yun barked a derisive laugh:
"What's wrong, ditch-digger?! Frozen in your tracks?! If your knees have turned to jelly after beholding true dragon fire, drop your sewer spanner and crawl back to your ditch!"
Austin didn't look over.
He pushed his spectacles firmly onto the bridge of his nose. He shifted his grip down the long blue handle of the Stellar-Steel wrench, choking up slightly near the hardened knurled adjustment nut.
No spiritual chants. No ten-syllable technique names. Zero flaming dragons.
Austin lifted the heavy blue jaw about six inches off the glassy face of the obelisk.
With a relaxed, loose-wristed flick—like a piano technician tapping an A-440 tuning fork against a wooden block—he gave the ancient monument a light, precise tap.
*TINK.*
A tiny, crisp metallic click. It barely made it past the sand barrier.
Then the laws of physics clocked in for their shift.
The infinite tensile yield strength and degenerate stellar mass of Tier 4 Stellar-Steel struck the pre-stressed, brittle molecular lattice of un-tempered volcanic glass.
That casual tap drove a focused, hypersonic acoustic compression pulse straight into the geometric core of the sixty-foot monolith.
*BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT!*
The ten thousand liquid gold runes didn't just illuminate.
They flared into an eye-searing, violet-white nova!
The numbers tore up the vertical register like a snapped cable on an elevator counterweight:
*1,000... 5,000... 8,000... 10,000!*
The readout pinned the top stop in one-thousandth of a second.
The runes flashed yellow, turned blinding orange, and then burned straight into an angry, smoking crimson:
*20,000... 50,000... 100,000... 500,000...*
*CRACK-POP!*
The internal quartz transducer blew its alchemical circuits, flashing an error code along the entire sixty-foot monolith:
**[FATAL EXCEPTION: STACK OVERFLOW / VALUE: NaN]**!
Right behind the digital overload, the hypersonic compression wave caught the obelisk’s natural resonant frequency.
*SKRRRRRRRR-SHATTER.*
The ancient Nether-Obsidian monument—a fixture that had absorbed the full-power blows of dragon kings, war gods, and foundation heroes for thirty centuries—suffered complete structural yield failure.
Every internal molecular bond gave up at once under destructive harmonic interference.
*FSSSSSSSSSH.*
No explosive shrapnel. No flying rock.
The sixty-foot monolith slid straight down into its own footprint, collapsing like a tower of dry beach sand hit by a wave. It settled into a neat, symmetrical, thirty-foot-wide conical mound of sparkling black obsidian grit.
*Poof.*
A soft, lazy puff of fine black dust drifted out over the chalk mark and dissolved into the afternoon breeze.
Dead silence fell over the Grand Martial Arena.
A quarter of a million spectators forgot how to inhale.
Arbiter Tie’s jaw hung slack, his mouth open wide enough to catch swallows. His heavy brass ledger slipped from numb iron fingers and thumped facedown into the dirt.
Huo Yun’s mouth twitched. His fingers loosened. His Earth-Grade Blazing Dragon Sword slid from his limp grip, its tip driving into the sand with a hollow clatter. His eyes bulged until scarlet veins spiderwebbed across the whites.
Austin lowered his five-foot blue wrench, leaning the knurled jaw against his knee.
He reached out with his boot toe, giving the mound of black sand a couple of gentle, exploratory kicks to check the aggregate size.
"Told you," Austin said into the silence, his deadpan contractor drawl carrying across the front rows. "Un-annealed amorphous silica under high-frequency harmonic load. You hit pre-stressed glass with the right acoustic frequency, the internal lattice shears itself to dust. Basic vibrational mechanics. Always stress-relieve your weldments, boys."
Austin turned toward Arbiter Tie, nudging his midnight-blue hard hat back with his thumb.
"So... does that clear the five-thousand-point cutoff?" Austin asked, completely matter-of-fact. "Or do you boys keep a spare high-striker in the storage shed?"
Arbiter Tie opened his mouth, but only a dry squeak came out.
And then, deep down in Austin’s lower abdomen, the kinetic recoil from that degenerate acoustic strike reverberated into his dantian.
The White Dwarf Seed hit its next thermodynamic compression threshold!
*DING.*
A chime like a drop-forge striking cold steel rang through his soul.
Level 28 had dropped into place.