By mid-afternoon, the gouged sand of the combat pit had been scraped down to bedrock and swept clean of wyrm droppings. In its place, eight raised masonry platforms stood spaced fifty yards apart, each rigged with a refractory brick forge, dual-action bronze bellows, and deep granite troughs filled with alchemical brine for quenching.
Two hundred and fifty thousand spectators pressed against the arena balustrades, leaning into the rising heat haze. The Grand Artisan Championship was where the imperial guilds showed off their deepest bloodline secrets, and the crowd wanted fireworks.
Platforms One through Seven delivered on cue.
At Platform One, Grandmaster Mo stoked his coals with *Nine-Yang True Fire*, chanting four-line stanzas from an archaic metallurgy scripture while thirty-thousand-year Cold-Iron turned white-hot. Over on Platform Two, Master Lu flung handfuls of crushed phoenix marrow into an open bronze crucible, weaving silver lightning filaments into the fuller of a seven-foot ceremonial halberd. Platform Three was shrouded in freezing blue vapor as Master Qian dunked a rippling serpentine rapier into venom milked from an abyssal frost-adder, sending clouds of choking aerosol drifting toward the VIP loges.
Then came Platform Eight.
Austin stood behind an unplaned spruce workbench, looking over his layout.
He had on his regular gear: the dark-blue hard hat with the scuffed brim, grease-darkened denim overalls, a four-pouch leather tool rig, and steel-toed work boots. Down around his ankles, shaded by the legs of the bench, twelve smooth gray river stones and thirty pine needles circled in slow, lazy planetary orbits, humming at three revolutions a minute.
While the other seven smiths had handed the quartermasters requisition scrolls three feet long—demanding chimera sinew, powdered spirit gems, and star-iron ingots priced higher than a provincial tax levy—Austin’s supply ticket had listed four items:
1. Forty pounds of standard four-inch schedule-80 black iron pipe. 2. A two-foot remnant of vegetable-tanned harness leather. 3. A five-gallon jug of raw, unrefined mineral castor oil. 4. A 24-tooth hacksaw, a die-stock with imperial thread dies, a triangular bastard file, and an oil squirt can.
The imperial storekeeper who hauled the crate down to the platform had been shivering so hard his topknot shook, bowing every four steps to ask if the honored master required powdered dragon bone or celestial star-amber. Austin had simply set his brass slide gauge across the pipe’s outside diameter, checked the wall thickness, nodded once, and waved the poor bastard back to the supply depot.
Austin unrolled Master Tang’s parchment schematics, pinning the sheet to his wooden clipboard with a brass spring clamp.
Austin took a pull from his grease pencil, letting his gaze sweep the smoky arena floor.
"Swords. Decorative halberds. Flaming daggers," he muttered under his breath, shaking his head at the shower of purple sparks flying from Platform Four. "Every single person on this continent has terminal weapon-crafting brain rot. How many pointy steel bars does one kingdom need? You can’t pave a wagon lane with an heirloom broadsword. You can’t level a bridge abutment with a glowing polearm. When a spring freshet washes out a culvert and dumps fifty tons of river gravel across the supply road, what’re they gonna do? Challenge the gravel to single combat? What this place needs is real lifting capacity."
Austin set the black iron pipe into the bench vise and cranked the lead screw down tight.
He picked up the hacksaw.
*SKRRR-CHIK. SKRRR-CHIK.*
Long, steady, rhythmic strokes. Austin’s shoulder stayed level, blade tracking square to the pipe axis. In less than two minutes, he dropped a fifteen-inch section of heavy-walled pipe into his palm to serve as the fluid reservoir. He took the triangular file and ran three quick passes around the inside rim, cleaning away the cut burr until the steel edge was smooth as a turned coin.
Next came the lifting ram. He reached into his canvas rucksack and hauled out a scrap chunk of Tier 4 Stellar-Steel—an irregular cylindrical off-cut from the wellhead refit.
Austin didn't bother lighting the brick hearth. He didn't touch the bronze bellows.
He rested the blue billet in the palm of his left work glove. A pinprick of white heat—roughly two hundred thousand Kelvin bled off from his inner stellar furnace—flowed into the metal. The stubborn cosmic alloy softened instantly, turning yielding as chilled wax under his fingers. With his right hand, Austin seated a brass thread die onto the end of the shaft, gripped the die handle with his five-foot blue pipe wrench, and leaned into the turn.
*Screee-chink, screee-chink.*
Fine blue-metal shavings curled off the cutter in paper-thin spirals, ringing against the stone floor like brass filings. The pitch was crisp, continuous, and cut to two-thousandths of an inch tolerance.
From the harness leather scrap, Austin punched out two circular cup seals using an iron wad punch and a copper hammer. He dropped the leather discs into a shallow tin of castor oil, kneading them with his thumbs until the fiber drank the oil and turned pliable as wet calfskin. He seated the soaked cups into the machined grooves on the piston head, creating an airtight, high-pressure seal that would expand under load.
Two polished ball bearings—salvaged from a scrap hub—dropped into the machined valve seats at the cylinder base, acting as simple gravity check valves. Austin poured four quarts of clear mineral oil into the reservoir jacket, worked the intake rocker twice to purge air bubbles from the manifold, and torqued down the top gland nut with his pipe wrench:
*CLANG.*
He slipped a twelve-inch hollow pipe lever into the pump rocker arm.
He set the finished tool upright on the bare spruce boards of Platform Eight.
Sixteen inches tall. Dark-gray iron housing. Knurled brass release valve at the foot, ground-flat steel base plate, and a mirror-polished lifting ram protruding from the top collar. A single smudge of black graphite grease sat near the reservoir fill plug.
Total fabrication time: eighteen minutes.
Austin wiped down his hands with an oily cotton rag, brushed iron dust off his knees, and pulled a rough three-legged stool up to the edge of the platform.
He popped the latch on his cedar bento box. Inside was a warm, hard-boiled solar egg from his morning pack. He cracked the shell against the bench corner, peeled the white skin in three clean strips, sprinkled a pinch of coarse gray salt from a wax-paper packet, and took a bite.
He cracked the lid on his vacuum thermos, took a sip of jasmine tea, and spent the next three hours and forty minutes watching seven imperial grandmasters scream, sweat through their silk robes, and spit mouthfuls of blood onto their glowing crucibles.
***
By late afternoon, the official adjudication delegation reached the eighth platform.
Provincial Governor Zhao led the procession, surrounded by Grandmaster Ouyang and seven senior guild inspectors in flowing emerald silk robes. Every man held a hair-tipped ink brush and a gilded scoring ledger, though their hands trembled so hard the jade brush barrels clicked together like dry reeds.
The other platforms had presented extraordinary spectacles. Grandmaster Mo’s *Nine-Suns Dragon-Slaying Halberd* had sent geysers of flame thirty feet into the grandstands (scored 94 points). Master Lu’s *Eight-Trigrams Thunder Mirror* had crackled with lightning runes bright enough to blind three heralds (scored 95 points).
Now the judges gathered around Platform Eight.
They stared down at the gray, sixteen-inch iron cylinder.
Zero carved dragons. No inlaid spirit jades. Clean, bare steel casing without a whisper of rune-work. Only the heavy, honest smell of warm mineral castor oil and the dull sheen of bare, machined iron.
Governor Zhao wiped a sleeve across his sweating jowls, bowing so low his nose nearly brushed the workbench.
"Supreme Master Austin..." Zhao’s voice wobbled like a loose fan blade. "This humble servant... and the imperial examiners... await your celestial explanation. What manner of ancient, world-suppressing artifact have your divine hands wrought before this gathering?"
Austin swallowed the last bite of his hard-boiled egg, wiped his mouth with a napkin, and stood up from the stool.
"Ain't nothing magical about it," Austin said plainly, adjusting the brim of his hard hat. "It’s a fifty-ton hydraulic bottle jack."
The nine judges stared blankly.
Grandmaster Ouyang’s monocle slipped off his nose, swinging on its braided cord. "A... a bottle... jack?"
"Hydraulic force multiplier," Austin explained, tapping the top ram with his yellow pencil. "Runs on Pascal’s principle of fluid displacement. You exert pressure on a confined liquid, that pressure gets transmitted equal and undiminished through the whole closed system. Small piston drives a large piston. You slide this under a collapsed timber, an overturned freight wagon, or a cracked bridge abutment. Pump this lever handle with one hand, and the fluid transfers the load. Lifts fifty tons off the ground with about ten pounds of elbow grease."
Ouyang's mouth dropped open. "Ten pounds of mortal effort... to hoist one hundred thousand pounds of deadweight?!"
"Go ahead and test it," Austin shrugged. "Tools don't need speeches."
The examiners looked around the platform perimeter.
Sitting near the eastern stone stair was an ancient quarry marker—a solid, twenty-foot block of volcanic basalt used as an arena anchoring counterweight. Imperial records had its weight cataloged down to the stone: exactly one hundred and twenty thousand pounds. Sixty tons of dead basalt.
Under Austin's calm instruction, four burly arena attendants wedged the jack's steel base plate beneath the chipped corner of the basalt slab.
Austin stepped back, gesturing with his pencil. "Take the lever, Governor. Give her three steady strokes. When you want to lower the load, crack that brass needle valve a quarter turn counter-clockwise."
Governor Zhao approached the steel pipe handle as though it were the tail of a sleeping tiger.
His fingers clamped around the hollow pipe.
Zhao kept his dantian sealed shut. No circulating qi. No bloodline secret arts. Just a tired, middle-aged bureaucrat's hand pressing down on a length of hollow black iron.
*PUMP.*
A sharp, crisp hydraulic hiss vented through the manifold: *Ssssss.*
The sixty-ton basalt boulder lifted a clean inch off the flagstones.
Zhao's knees nearly buckled. His breath hitched in his throat.
*PUMP.*
Two inches.
*PUMP. PUMP. PUMP.*
In less than twelve seconds, using nothing more than the casual wrist action of an accountant signing a tax receipt, the Governor of thirty million subjects hoisted sixty tons of mountain granite six inches into the open air.
Zhao stared at his hand.
He stared at the small iron bottle holding sixty tons of solid stone in suspension—zero spiritual arrays, zero soul-bindings, just pure mechanical leverage.
Grandmaster Ouyang fell straight to his knees on the sand, burying his face in his hands as tears carved streaks through the soot on his cheeks.
"Zero spirit runes..." Ouyang wept, his voice cracking into high-pitched delirium. "No bound elemental souls! A peasant apprentice with bad knees... an old farmer with a sprained wrist... could hoist a collapsed city gate with a single arm!"
Ouyang threw his arms toward the heavens, his robes trailing in the grit:
"THIS TRANSCENDS METALLURGY! THIS IS THE ANCIENT DAO OF PHYSICAL PROPORTION! THE RAW TRUTH OF HYDRAULIC DISPLACEMENT!"
The nine judges lunged for their scoring ledgers with frantic, ink-spattering haste, slashing thick vermilion characters across the silk paper:
**100 POINTS!**
**100 POINTS!**
**100 POINTS!**
*"A UNANIMOUS PERFECT SCORE OF ONE HUNDRED POINTS!"* Arbiter Tie’s shriek echoed through the bronze resonance horn, shaking the caldera walls. *"THE SUPREME ARTISAN GRAND CHAMPION OF THE CENTENNIAL JUBILEE IS MASTER AUSTIN OF SUNSET PEAK!"*
A stunned beat passed, and then two hundred and fifty thousand spectators erupted into a roaring standing ovation that rattled the volcanic cliffs.
Austin nodded once, satisfied, sliding his pencil back behind his ear before packing his oil can into his canvas rucksack.
"Fair enough," Austin muttered, watching the attendants inspect the hydraulic seal. "Good to see an inspection board that knows honest mechanical leverage when they see it. Beats giving trophies to gaudy wall-hangers."