Before the hundred-foot verdigris bronze portal of the Immortal Void Gate, the air smelled like ozone and murder. Arcs of conflicting spiritual qi snapped across the basalt terrace, throwing sparks into the dust like a bad grounding wire on a high-voltage rig.
Surrounding the stone dais was a wall of five thousand elite cultivators. Core disciples with white knuckles on sword grips. Elders stroking gray beards with narrowed, calculating eyes.
Up on the sacred offering terrace, two men were screaming at each other like subcontractors fighting over a shared dumpster.
On the left was **Grand Elder Qi** of the Heavenly Dao Alliance. Peak Golden Core. Flowing robes of pure white cloud-silk, holding an ancient jade astrolabe in his left hand and a seven-star horsetail fly-whisk in his right. Behind him stood three hundred orthodox disciples chanting harmonic verses to keep their master’s golden aura flaring like a spotlight.
On the right stood **Young Master Xie** of the Blood-Nether Demon Sect. Spiked black-dragon plate on his shoulders. Skin pale as lime putty. His five-foot curved blood-saber hissed continuously, dripping corrosive red miasma that pitted the basalt wherever it splashed. Behind him, two hundred demonic berserkers gripped bone spears, itching for the word to charge.
"The Heavenly Dao Alliance fasted on mountain fog and refined starlight for sixty straight years to calculate the exact geometry of this conjunction!" Grand Elder Qi yelled, beard bristling with righteous fury. "Our sect holds the First Imperial Void Token, handed down by the founders! When the three moons line up in seventy-two hours, we take the threshold first! Anyone who pushes ahead defies the order of Heaven itself!"
"Old fraud! Save your sermon for the cremation pit!" Young Master Xie snarled, black demonic fire billowing from his greaves. "Our Blood-Nether Sect paid for our Dragon-Bone Key with the slaughter of an entire dragon-whale pod! The strong take what they want beneath the sky! The jungle rules this realm, not your dusty charts! Take one step ahead of our vanguard and I’ll flay your skin for drum heads!"
Their domain pressures slammed together in midair. Golden celestial light hammered into boiling crimson smoke, cracking the flagstones with the dull boom of blasting charges. Steel cleared scabbards. Red war banners whipped in the wind.
The entire terrace was half a heartbeat away from a riot that would leave five thousand bodies on the slab.
Then, from the bottom of the western steps, came a steady, heavy thud:
*Clomp, clomp, clomp.*
Steel toes on basalt. Heavy, unhurried, and dead-flat.
Austin came walking up the marble stairs.
Tucked tight under his left arm was his pine clipboard, stacked with blue-line schematics and First Epoch architectural drawings. Slung across his right shoulder was his five-foot, iridescent blue Stellar-Steel pipe wrench, its knurled nut catching the sunlight. Down around his ankles, eighty-four bits of river gravel, dried pine needles, and lathe shavings hummed in their three concentric rings at sixty cycles a second, steady as an industrial sub-station.
Trotting right behind him was Li Xiaoyao, balancing a steel toolbox in one hand and the wooden surveyor's tripod in the other. The kid offered cheerful, polite nods to the glaring demonic berserkers, looking for all the world like an apprentice hauling tools on a Monday morning.
Lumbering up the rear was Cerberus Pug.
The eight-hundred-pound Nether-Solar Cerberus ambled onto the terrace, yawning wide with all three heads at once. His middle snout drifted toward a demonic battle standard made of tanned human leather, gave it a wet sniff, sneezed, and accidentally torched the tassels to ash with a stray spark of solar backfire. The demonic standard-bearer turned gray as wet cement, shaking so hard his spear point chattered against his breastplate.
Austin didn't slow his stride. He walked straight through the front rank of drawn blades, stepping square between Grand Elder Qi and Young Master Xie like a superintendent walking between two drywallers arguing over whose tape measure was off.
"Excuse me," Austin said in his flat contractor drawl, not even glancing at their faces. "Pardon me, guys. Just need to get to the panel."
Young Master Xie choked on his war cry. Grand Elder Qi’s fly-whisk hung frozen in the air.
Austin walked right past both of them, heading straight for the bottom-right corner of the hundred-foot bronze slab where the frame joined the bedrock footer.
He reached into his breast pocket, pulled out his wire-rimmed glasses, and shoved them onto his nose. He reached up to his midnight-blue hard hat and clicked the toggle on his dual-beam LED headlamp. A crisp, five-thousand-kelvin white beam cut through the hazy incense smoke, washing over the pitted verdigris bronze.
His gamer HUD flickered to life in clean green phosphor lines.
Austin stared at the HUD readouts for a long three count.
He looked up at the eighty-foot decorative dials climbing the bronze pillars. He looked at the concentric gear teeth that sects had spent centuries tracing with ink brushes and copper gauges.
Then he leaned in, tapping the bronze with the blunt wax tip of his yellow grease pencil.
*Clack, clack.*
Zero clearance behind the teeth. Solid casting. They didn't mesh with an internal gear train; they were shallow relief carvings, purely ornamental, like fake styrofoam crown molding slapped on a commercial drop ceiling by an apprentice trying to look fancy.
Austin gave a dry, raspy chuckle, shaking his head.
"Unbelievable," Austin muttered, wiping a smudge of green corrosion off his grease pencil. "The whole clockwork facade is decorative molding. Some local stonecarver chiselled planetary dials into the casing three thousand years ago to make it look mystic, and now fifty thousand people are camping in the dirt for three days waiting for the moons to line up. Nobody ever took a flashlight and looked behind the flange to see if the gears actually hooked to a shaft."
The entire terrace froze solid.
Grand Elder Qi’s mouth dropped open. The fly-whisk drooped toward his shoes.
Young Master Xie stood paralyzed, his blood-saber trembling, the red smoke sputtering out like wet pine on a campfire.
Five thousand cultivators stared at the man in denim dungarees. Disciples looked from the yellow grease pencil to the eighty-foot bronze pillars, their minds locking up like seized crankpins.
*Decorative molding?! Fake gears?! What was this maniac in the blue hat saying before the sacred gate of the First Gods?!*
Young Master Xie snapped first. Veins corded down his neck, purple and swollen. He leveled his five-foot curved blood-saber straight at Austin’s hard hat, the edge sizzling:
"Insolent dirt-scratching peasant!" Xie screamed, spit flying from his lips. "You dare touch the Immortal Void Gate with your greasy fingers?! You dare mock the craftsmanship of the ancient ancestors?! This platform is reserved for the ninety-nine chosen prodigies of heaven! Back up three hundred paces and smash your forehead on the stone until you bleed out, or I’ll gut you and feed your intestines to my war crows!"
Austin didn't flinch. He didn't even look at the red steel trembling two inches from his eyebrow.
Instead, his eyes dropped to the sizzling droplets of blood-acid dripping off Xie's blade onto the bronze sill plate.
"Hey, pal," Austin said, his voice dripping with tired site-boss irritation. "First off, you're dripping corrosive runoff straight onto structural bronze. That’s a hazardous chemical discharge violation. Second, you're blocking an emergency egress route. Municipal building code section ten-point-two strictly mandates a thirty-six-inch clear pathway in front of all high-pressure fire exits at all times. No storage crates, no decorative banners, and definitely no loitering with bare steel. Back up so I can reach the badge reader."
"You... you called me 'pal'?! You cite 'fire exits' to me?!" Xie gasped, trembling with outrage. "I am the young master of the Blood-Nether—"
Grand Elder Qi shoved his way forward, cutting Xie off with a sharp wave of his fly-whisk. Qi looked down his crooked nose at Austin, dripping with pious contempt.
"Ignorant mortal," Qi sneered, his voice ringing with aristocratic disdain. "The Sacred Gate of the Gods answers only to the harmonic conjunction of the Three Moons and the sacrifice of ninety-nine ancient Void Spirit Jade Tokens! Even a Peak Nascent Soul ancestor cannot leave a scratch on this celestial alloy! How could an unwashed laborer with a plumber's wrench ever hope to trip the ancient lock?!"
Behind him, five thousand disciples burst into mocking, shrill laughter:
"A clown in work dungarees thinks he's a master locksmith!"
"He thinks his blue wrench can turn the wheels of heaven!"
Austin didn't argue. He didn't offer a witty comeback. He didn't bother flaring his aura.
He just reached behind his shoulder and popped the heavy brass snaps on his canvas rucksack.
With both hands, he reached deep into the quilted wool interior, moving with the careful, deliberate calm of a technician pulling a fragile calibrate tool from its flight case.
He lifted out a twelve-inch, matte-black metallic cube: the **First Epoch Machine Terminal Interface Root Core**.
The black box sat heavy and solid in his gloved hands. Its brushed alloy skin drank in the desert sun, while hairline cyan circuitry channels pulsed along the beveled seams with faint, rhythmic flickers of electric light. A subtle sixty-hertz electromagnetic hum bled from the housing, instantly making every jade talisman within thirty paces buzz and crackle with static feedback.
Grand Elder Qi’s eyes bulged. "What... what manner of black brick is that?"
Young Master Xie lowered his saber an inch, his blood-flames flickering out, unsettled by the total absence of spiritual qi coming off the cold metal block.
Austin stepped right past Xie's blade, walking up to a smooth, dark rectangular glass plate recessed into the bronze casing beside the door jamb. The scanner face was caked with three centuries of windblown alkali powder, half-obscuring an ancient embossed serial plate that read: `SUBTERRANEAN RESEARCH VAULT 04 - EXTERIOR EGRESS PORTAL B`.
Austin pulled up the cuff of his denim sleeve and wiped the glass clean with a solid swipe of his forearm.
Then he looked back over his shoulder at Grand Elder Qi, Young Master Xie, and the five thousand frozen cultivators.
"Three days of planetary conjunction?" Austin gave a short, dry snort. "Pal, that’s just the loading screen."
Austin hoisted the black cube.
With a smooth, practiced tap, he pressed the root terminal flat against the glass reader:
*BEEP.*