The tear in reality remained clamped between the jaws of Austin’s five-foot Stellar-Steel pipe wrench.
The black fissure whistled like a cracked steam pipe and spat faint blue sparks. The air above the Central Jade Dais bent as space strained against the hardened teeth.
Austin planted his boots in the broken pavers. He gripped the end of the handle with both leather gloves.
“Cross-threaded all to hell. This is what happens when amateurs force a fine-thread fitting into a coarse-thread boss. If you don’t seat a pressure joint properly, the whole thing shakes apart on the first cycle.”
He drove through his heels and leaned into the handle.
The five-foot wrench turned forty-five degrees clockwise.
CREEEEEEEEEEEEEAK——!
The sound was not thunder. It was the groan of a huge, rusted bridge fitting being forced to move.
The wrench turned the fabric of space with it.
Austin’s lever had ninety-five quintillion pounds of mass behind it. Spiritual power met plain mechanical advantage, and leverage won.
SNAP-POP.
The black fissure closed like a cork seating in a bottle.
The void leak stopped. The ragged seam smoothed over until no mark remained. Air rushed softly into the gap and then settled.
Fifty feet above, Jiang Taixu was still linked to the void slash through his burning soul-blood.
When Austin turned the seam, the force traveled straight up that link.
WHOOSH-WHOOSH-SPIN!
The three-hundred-year-old Sword Saint spun in the sky like a runaway ceiling fan.
Ten turns a second. Twenty.
His white robes spread flat and shed thousands of crane feathers. His silver hair became a blur. His arms and legs flapped like loose cloth.
Then the twelve-gravity field caught him.
KAPOW!
Jiang slammed face-first into the arena sand beside the block of crushed swords.
SPLAT.
He hit like a sack of wet flour dropped from a barn roof.
The living legend of the southern provinces lay spread-eagled in a human-shaped crater. His face was three inches deep in the sand. His silver hair fanned across his shoulders, thick with dirt.
The heavy field pinned him there.
Two hundred and fifty thousand spectators stared in silence.
For three hundred years, Jiang had ruled the southern skies. He had destroyed an invading army with one stroke. Governors had knelt before him.
Now he was a Half-Step Nascent Soul doormat.
In the royal box, Zhao rubbed his watering eyes. “He spun the Sword Saint like a bamboo toy and drove him into the ground.”
Ouyang gripped his knees. “Space itself groaned like an ungreased cart axle. What kind of ancient tool-lore is this?”
Down in the crater, Jiang opened his one unswollen eye.
Three inches from his bleeding nose rested the blue head of Austin’s pipe wrench.
He stared at its brass adjustment nut. At the clean teeth. At the worn blue paint.
Three hundred years of sword training turned over in his mind.
Why did my Heaven-Severing Void Slash fail?
No heavenly blade had stopped it. The cut had failed because Jiang had forced it along a line he knew was wrong. He had trusted an old instruction more than his own eyes.
A bad cut stays bad, even when a master tells you to make it.
The thought hurt more than the fall. It also loosened something that eighty years in a frozen cave had not touched.
Inside his battered dantian, the pieces of his cracked Golden Core settled instead of breaking apart. Qi moved along a cleaner path. The cracks closed, and his core formed again around that simple correction.
A clear Nascent Soul aura spread from his chest. Jiang had advanced, but he felt no urge to celebrate. He had nearly killed a crowd to protect his pride, and one corrected mistake did not pay that debt.
Pug trotted over with the sword sheath in his middle mouth. He sniffed Jiang’s dusty robes and bare heels. His left head snorted. His right head licked dirt from the Sword Saint’s ear. Then he dropped the chewed sheath beside Jiang’s nose and wagged his tail.
Xiaoyao watched the amber light with wide eyes and wrote quickly.
Lesson forty-three: when turning an elder with a plumbing tool, use proper rotation. Correct torque may cause a full realm breakthrough.
Austin checked the floor with his chalk line, then looked down at Jiang.
His HUD updated.
Austin put the chalk line away and tapped Jiang’s shoulder with his boot.
“See? You crossed the threads before you tightened the joint. Line things up first or you strip everything. Basic mechanics.”
He pointed toward the stacked scrap with his yellow pencil.
“Now get off my clean sand. You’re getting hair oil and blood all over the floor. I don’t have a cleaning crew, and we’ve got work to do.”