Inside the Grand Imperial State Suite, the air still smelled like sun-drenched plum orchards, wild mountain lilacs, and hot summer pine needles.
The double doors had barely finished shuddering against the plaster before Provincial Governor Zhao and twelve senior imperial councilors hit the floor. They didn't just kneel; they threw themselves flat out on their stomachs, skidding across the polished red sandalwood like terrified seals on wet rocks. Hoisted between their trembling hands, held high above their silk-wrapped topknots, were two massive, three-foot-tall tablets of solid, mirror-polished imperial gold.
"Patriarch! Sovereign of the Solar Realm! Divine Architect of the Cosmic Dawn!" Governor Zhao shrieked, his forehead smacking into the wood with a dull wet thud. Sweat and snot dripped off his chin, smearing against the dark wax finish. "We have witnessed the golden miracle of your ascension! The dead timber of our citadel blooms with fresh leaves under the holy heat of your nostrils! We know our mortal borders cannot contain your boundless majesty! We beg you... on behalf of ten million trembling souls... accept this eternal covenant of Canglan Province!"
Austin stood beside the worktable, his birch clipboard tucked under his arm and his yellow grease pencil resting behind his ear.
He stared down at the thirteen high-ranking officials groveling in the dust.
Behind him, Southern Sword Saint Jiang Taixu snapped to attention. His patched linen robes fluttered, his newly sharpened blue carpenter's pencil gleamed behind his ear, and his dark UV safety goggles flashed under the chandeliers. Seeing Governor Zhao's trembling fingers inch within arm's reach of Austin’s steel-toed boots, Jiang Taixu stepped forward, his right hand leveled in an aggressive, knife-hand perimeter strike.
"Halt, mortals!" Jiang Taixu barked. His voice carried the deep, rhythmic grind of a five-hundred-pound brass gear spinning at full throttle. "Do not drag your uncalibrated footwear into the Master's cleanroom perimeter! Establish a three-meter clearance zone, or I shall trim your dimensional coordinates with a zero-point-one-millimeter spatial tolerance!"
Governor Zhao flinched so hard his imperial jade hairpin snapped, skittering across the floorboards. He frantically pulled his elbows back two inches while keeping the heavy gold slabs hoisted overhead.
Austin let out a weary sigh, pressing two fingers to the bridge of his spectacles.
"Subcontractor Jiang, stand down. It’s an administrative delegation, not an OSHA site audit. Put the knife-hands away before you poke an eye out."
"Disciple obeys the Master's perimeter protocols!" Jiang Taixu snapped, pivoting on his heel and locking his hands behind his back at parade rest.
Austin walked around the corner of the rosewood table. His boots thudded against the sandalwood with heavy, immovable Level 35 authority. He stopped two feet from the prostrated officials, pointing his grease pencil at the two yellow slabs.
"Alright, what's this?" Austin asked flatly. "Another municipal noise citation? Because if this is about the acoustic profile on the modem handshake, I already told you that was an uncompressed analog baud negotiation. Carrier frequencies are entirely grandfathered under standard telecommunications right-of-way easements."
"NO! HEAVENS WITNESS, NO!" Governor Zhao squeaked, shaking his head so violently his cheeks flapped against the floor. "It is not a citation! It is the **Grand Provincial Sovereign Treaty**! Passed unanimously by an emergency session of the Provincial Council, countersigned by Grandmaster Ouyang of the Imperial Metallurgy Guild, and sealed with the imperial authority of the Great Yan Empire!"
Austin cocked an eyebrow.
He bent down, examining the heavy metal tablets. Each slab was roughly three inches thick, three feet tall, and forged from pure Nine-Yang Gold. Archaic, flowery calligraphy flowed down the polished faces in poetic couplets, framed by an engraved nine-clawed dragon coiled around an anvil.
*From a purely structural standpoint,* Austin thought, shaking his head in disgust, *this is an appalling waste of bullion. Solid gold has lousy tensile strength, creeps under load, and deforms if you look at it wrong. Hauling four hundred pounds of soft precious metal as a document carrier instead of standard twenty-pound bond paper or a triplicate carbon-copy pad is peak bureaucratic rot. You drop this on your toes, you're breaking three metatarsals and spending the afternoon in an orthopedic cast.*
Before he could give the governor a lecture on standard letter-sized office supplies, his ocular HUD chimed. A crisp blue border boxed the golden tablets, translating the archaic poetry into a clean, no-nonsense commercial term sheet:
Austin blinked behind his lenses.
His gaze locked onto Clause One, then skipped straight to Clause Three.
"Hold on a second," Austin muttered, scratching his stubbled jaw with the eraser end of his pencil. "Clause One: Extraterritorial sovereignty with full municipal tax exemption for ten thousand consecutive years? Zero building permits required, zero zoning board variance hearings, and zero imperial property taxes?"
"Yes, Patriarch!" Governor Zhao blubbered into the sandalwood. "The entire Mount Clear Sky range shall be your private, sovereign domain! No tax assessor, no royal magistrate, and no imperial army shall ever cross your boundary survey pins without your written permit!"
Austin let out a low, appreciative whistle.
"A ten-thousand-year tax holiday. In my old world, multinational conglomerates burned eight-figure legal budgets on offshore shell corporations just to claw back a ten-year tax abatement. This game's regional governance engine has some wild legal loopholes."
Then he turned his attention to Clause Three: *Automated Monthly Supply Subscription*.
"One hundred wagonloads of refined copper bar stock and mineral lubricating oils delivered directly to my front porch on the first of every month?" Austin asked, narrowing his eyes. "Fifty crates of roasted meats and ten thousand high-grade spirit stones? Automatically delivered? Without me running escort quests, escorting convoys through bandit camps, or micro-managing supply wagons?"
Grandmaster Ouyang raised his bearded face from the floor, his eyes damp with reverence. "The Imperial Metallurgy Guild shall personally oversee the transit line, Master Austin! Our master blacksmiths will haul the wagons to the southern base of Mount Clear Sky every thirty days on the dot! If a single pint of machine oil leaks or a single copper bar goes missing, the Guild shall replace it tenfold from our private vaults!"
Austin glanced over his shoulder at Li Xiaoyao.
"Xiaoyao, run the logistics on that."
The boy stood at proud attention, clutching the birch ledger against his chest. "Master, that's enough copper bar stock to wire five complete subterranean sub-stations every quarter! And fifty crates of roasted spiritual meat means Pug stays fed through the entire winter without us dipping into our cured emergency stores!"
Under the table, Cerberus Pug let out an enthusiastic, three-headed bark of canine approval: *WOOF-WOOF-WOOF!*
Austin turned back to the golden tablets, nodding slowly to himself with deep, genuine gamer admiration.
"A recurring monthly login reward bundle," Austin said, grinning. "Actually, with the daily deliveries broken down, it's essentially an automated daily login bonus. Passive raw material drops without babysitting supply routes, guaranteed currency liquidity, and top-tier dog food delivered on schedule. That clears out ninety percent of my Floor Two smelting bottlenecks."
Governor Zhao signaled frantically to an attendant waiting near the door.
The attendant scrambled forward on his knees, carrying a carved jade bowl filled with powdered cinnabar and the steaming, vermilion blood of a third-tier fire dragon: "Patriarch! Please, seal the covenant with your divine soul-blood!"
"Get that biohazard away from me," Austin said, waving the bowl back with an expression of deep disgust. "I'm not slicing my thumb to sign a commercial supply contract. Biological fluid on legal instruments violates chain-of-custody protocols and contaminates the document surface. Use proper writing utensils."
Austin reached up and pulled the thick yellow grease pencil from behind his ear.
He leaned down over the massive slab of Nine-Yang Gold.
Right across the bottom margin of the golden tablet, directly beneath the embossed nine-clawed dragon seal, Austin set the soft wax tip against the mirror-polished metal.
With firm, heavy, deliberate strokes, he laid down a straight horizontal line and scrawled his name in blocky, no-nonsense industrial lettering:
**AUSTIN (CHU YUAN) — MASTER CONTRACTOR** **SUNSET PEAK FABRICATION & MAINTENANCE LLC**
*Squeak, squeak, scritch.*
The high-friction squeal of grease wax grinding across four-hundred-pound imperial gold rang through the dead-silent suite.
Austin blew a tiny curl of yellow wax shavings off the golden slab. He capped his pencil with a sharp *click*, reached down, and gave the metal a solid rap with his knuckle:
*Tink.*
"Terms accepted," Austin announced. "Standard commercial wholesale vendor agreement. Payment net-thirty upon monthly delivery inspection. Now listen to me carefully regarding delivery logistics."
Governor Zhao and the councilors strained forward, ears perked like eager hunting hounds.
"All delivery teams must use the southern service access road," Austin instructed in his firm job-site voice. "Do not cut across my newly seeded clover lawn. And tell your teamsters to stay completely clear of the drainage swales and culvert headwalls. We just poured the concrete footings for those culverts before we left for the tournament, and they are still in their twenty-eight-day curing window! Concrete takes time to reach design compressive strength! If an overloaded copper wagon runs off the gravel shoulder and chips my fresh-cured concrete curbing, I am billing the provincial treasury for structural remediation at time-and-a-half."
"We shall pave the access road in silk if necessary, Patriarch!" Governor Zhao wept aloud, clutching the yellow-wax-stained golden tablet to his chest as if it were a newborn child. "THE COVENANT IS SEALED! THE SACRED LLC HAS SPARED OUR REALM! MAY SUNSET PEAK FABRICATION & MAINTENANCE FLOURISH FOR TEN THOUSAND GENERATIONS!"
"Long live the Grand Foreman!" Grandmaster Ouyang cried, bowing his forehead to the wood. "Subcontractors to the heavens!"
Austin shook his head, rolling his eyes behind his lenses as he grabbed his clipboard and the First Epoch server cube from the table.
"Alright, pack it in," Austin said, turning to his crew. "The paperwork is filed, the loot is secured, and the daily login bonus is locked in. Xiaoyao, Jiang Taixu... head down to the imperial livery. Rig the pack-mules with balanced panniers. We're checking out at first light and heading back to Mount Clear Sky. We've got a hydraulic press to mount on Floor Two."
"DISCIPLE OBEYS THE MASTER'S COMMAND!" Li Xiaoyao and Jiang Taixu bellowed together, snapping into identical, mathematically verified forty-five-degree bows.
Cerberus Pug scrambled out from under the table, his stubby tail wagging with enough force to vibrate his hips, barking happily as he trotted toward the hallway.