The storm clouds over Canglan Citadel churned like a tub of molten lead.
The downforce hit the volcanic amphitheater like a dropped steel plate, cold enough to freeze spit in mid-air. Across the vast stone terraces, every iron saber, hunting dirk, bronze knife, and ceremonial blade began to hum inside its scabbard. Thousands of weapons vibrated in sympathetic resonance, a metallic chittering like a million angry locusts desperate to tear loose from leather frogs and bow down before the open sky.
Standing on the frosted Central Jade Dais, Provincial Governor Zhao looked up into the rotating eye of the blizzard.
The blood drained from his cheeks until his skin looked like wet sheepskin parchment. The jade beads sewn into his hem rattled against his shins like dry beans in a gourd. His throat clicked, choking out a cracked whisper:
*"The... The Sword Saint of the Southern Skies... Jiang Taixu!"*
Along the VIP verandas, venerable clan elders and Golden Core patriarchs upset their rosewood tables, scattering teacups and charcoal braziers as they went down flat on their bellies across the icy stone.
For eighty unbroken years, Jiang Taixu had remained sealed inside the Glacial Abyss of the Northern Marches, burning decades of mortal lifespan to force a breakthrough into the Nascent Soul realm. He was the southern hemisphere’s ultimate boogeyman—a walking disaster whose deeds were carved into the provincial frontier posts. Two centuries back, during the First Barbarian Incursion, Jiang Taixu had held the Iron Willow Pass alone. With one sweep of his seven-foot greatsword, he had sliced through ten thousand armored horsemen and severed the mountain ridge behind them down to the water table.
Now the mountain had come to town.
Hovering two hundred feet above the sunken combat pit, balancing with effortless poise atop a seven-foot slab of Glacial Cold-Iron, stood Jiang Taixu.
His white daoist robes were woven from crane down, snapping like heavy sailcloth in the gale. Long silver hair lashed around a sharp, bloodless face that looked carved from frozen river silt. Most terrifying were his eyes: two pinpoints of sapphire sword brilliance that cast blue slivers of light across the frosted arena. Every time the old monster blinked, the air split with the dry rip of shearing sheet metal.
Jiang Taixu looked down at the royal platform, his expression hardened into pure aristocratic revulsion.
"Governor Zhao," Jiang Taixu’s voice rolled off the caldera walls like grinding tectonic plates, thick with frost. "You have degraded the dignity of the imperial court. You have spat upon the memory of the founding ancestors."
Zhao pressed his forehead directly against the freezing jade tiles, his teeth chittering uncontrollably: "S-Senior Jiang! The Centennial Expo was held under imperial seal! The Ministry of Works and the Grand Artisan Guild—"
"SILENCE!"
The roar broke like an artillery shell over the arena. The sonic shockwave sheared through the air, lopping off three forty-foot cedar flagpoles along the southern wall with clean, diagonal cuts. The massive logs tumbled into the empty seats below with deafening crashes of splintering wood.
"The Crown Prince is a coddled whelp who chases shiny trinkets!" Jiang Taixu snarled, his voice carrying the bite of an arctic drift. "The First Epoch Core is the supreme ancestral inheritance of this realm! It conceals the forgotten schematics to the primeval celestial sword arrays—weapons that can cleave the astral heavens! It belongs by right to the Sword Dao! And you... you hand this cosmos-shattering engine to a common, grease-smeared ditch-digger?!"
Jiang Taixu’s freezing gaze slid downward, locking onto Austin.
The Sword Saint's jaw tightened in disgust.
He took in the ridiculous dark-blue plastic bowl perched on the boy's head. He took in the faded denim overalls, the stiff leather utility pouches loaded down with rusty iron spanners and copper measuring gauges, and the clunky, mud-caked steel-toed work boots.
Then his eyes found Austin’s left arm.
There, wedged casually between Austin’s ribs and elbow like a crate of spare spark plugs or a half-eaten loaf of cornbread, rested the sacred twelve-inch matte-black First Epoch server terminal. The pristine relic of the lost civilization was pressed tight against greasy blue denim.
Jiang Taixu’s aura flared like an erupting glacier. The moisture around him froze instantly into drifting needles of blue ice.
"Boy!" Jiang Taixu barked, pointing a pale, knifelike finger straight down. "Place that sacred cube on the imperial altar! Hack off both your filthy forearms at the elbow to cleanse the insult of your mechanic's grease! Then drag your belly across the stones and crawl out of this citadel like the worm you are! Hesitate for one heartbeat, and my sword will pare your flesh into ten thousand ribbons!"
Down on the frosted dais, Austin used his free right hand to nudge his work glasses back up his nose.
He shifted the forty-pound matte-black server terminal, clamping the milled housing tighter against his ribs. He made sure his canvas jacket hem covered the recessed serial port so the falling sleet wouldn't short out the six gold-plated diagnostic pins.
Beside him, Li Xiaoyao was vibrating with tension, knuckles white against the birch clipboard. "Master! That is Senior Jiang Taixu! The border chronicles say his sword can sever a river five leagues away!"
"Xiaoyao, write this down on the pad," Austin said, his voice level as a spirit level against the shrieking draft. "Citation one: unauthorized felling of municipal cedar timbers without a demo permit. Citation two: terroristic threats and harassment directed at a licensed guild contractor on an active job site. Mark that down for an immediate tier-two incident report."
Austin looked up through his lenses at the silver-haired figure floating in the gray sky.
His interface flashed with electric-blue text:
Austin let out a long, heavy sigh.
It was the exhausted, hollow sigh of an MMORPG player after a four-hour raid. He had cleared the trash mobs and popped the gold chest. Now, some max-level sweat-lord was griefing him on the extraction pad with an unskippable cutscene.
"Every single time," Austin grumbled to himself, rubbing the back of his neck. "Every regional tournament in every early-access title pulls this exact same lazy encounter. You take first place, the confetti hits the floor, and some edge-lord boss drops out of the clouds to deliver a four-paragraph villain speech about his bloodline."
Austin cupped his right hand to his mouth, hollering up into the howling gale:
"Hey! You! The guy in the white bathrobe!"
A dead, hollow silence fell across the caldera.
Two hundred thousand people stopped breathing at once.
*White... white bathrobe?!*
Governor Zhao’s eyes rolled toward his forehead. His fingers scrabbled at his collar, desperately wishing his eardrums had ruptured. Grandmaster Ouyang slumped flat on the carpet, mumbling frantic apologies to every dead ancestor in his genealogy.
Two hundred feet up, Jiang Taixu’s left eyelid twitched violently. The sapphire glare in his eyes flickered, then flared into a roaring blowtorch of murderous fury.
"What... what did you say to me, mortal?!"
"I said you in the white bathrobe!" Austin yelled back, his flat, nasal contractor voice cutting through the arctic draft like a dry saw blade. "First off, you are running completely afoul of municipal airspace code! You're hovering two hundred feet over an open-air public venue inside an active municipal flight path without an FAA-compliant transponder, zero clearance from flight control, and no anti-collision strobes! You're a low-altitude aviation hazard!"
Jiang Taixu hovered in mid-air, his aristocratic cheekbones twitching. "Transponder... what gibberish are you barking?!"
"Second point," Austin yelled, tapping the matte-black cube under his arm, "your localized cold front is dumping sub-zero moisture all over my four-hundred-and-eighty-volt server terminal! This chassis is rated for standard forty percent relative humidity! You're gonna cause condensation bridging across the motherboard traces!"
Austin unlatched his five-foot blue Stellar-Steel pipe wrench from his back harness, bringing the heavy, serrated jaws down onto the frosted jade pavers with an echoing:
*CLANG.*
"And look at your getup!" Austin pointed the wrench handle skyward. "Loose, billowing silk around high-velocity rotating hardware! Those wide sleeves are an extreme mechanical entanglement hazard! You get one of those hems sucked into a spinning sword hilt, and you'll be wrapped around the spindle before you can whistle your ancestral hymn! Zero hi-vis safety trim! Zero eye protection! No steel-toed footwear! You are a walking, flying OSHA nightmare!"
Austin spat a speck of grit onto the ice.
"Bring that blade down to grade level and talk like a normal subcontractor," Austin called up, his voice hard as cured rebar. "Before I hit you with reckless aerial operation, unlicensed demolition, and severe public endangerment."
The arena was quiet as a crypt.
The frost wind seemed to stall. The rattling blades in two hundred thousand sheaths froze solid. Every pair of eyes in the colosseum flicked back and forth between the kid in the denim dungarees and the legendary butcher of the Iron Willow Pass.
Jiang Taixu’s face turned from frosty marble to an apoplectic, suffocating purple.
Two centuries of untouchable martial glory... his standing as the supreme blade of the southern sky... his sacred Crane-Down Robes spun from the plumage of thousand-year spiritual avians... dismissed as a 'white bathrobe' and an 'aviation hazard' by an apprentice mechanic wearing an upside-down plastic salad bowl!
"WHITE BATHROBE?!" Jiang Taixu's roar broke the sound barrier with a concussive boom that cracked the stone dais.
"ENTANGLEMENT HAZARDS?! FLIGHT REGULATIONS?!"
The old monster's sanity snapped like dry kindling. He hurled both arms toward the firmament, his fingernails biting into his palms until beads of golden sword blood spattered across his sleeves.
His Peak Golden Core detonated like a collapsing glacier. Ten square miles of storm clouds were shredded to mist, obliterated by the violent release of three hundred years of pent-up sword intent!
*"DIE, INSECT! BEAR WITNESS TO THE ABSOLUTE WRATH OF THE SWORD DAO!"* Jiang Taixu shrieked, his silver hair standing on end like an electrical arc.
*"TEN THOUSAND VOID-SEVERING BLADES——AWAKEN!"*
*SKRRRRRRRRRRRR-SHING!*
A metallic screech tore through the sky.
In the span of half a second, the daylight above Canglan Citadel was blotted out entirely. The gray heavens vanished beneath an interlocking roof of **ten thousand flying spiritual swords**, each forged from blue Glacial Cold-Iron, burning with sub-zero sapphire flames, their needle points pivoting in unison—aimed dead center at Austin’s dark-blue hard hat!