The air before the Immortal Void Gate smelled of ozone and hot metal. Sparks jumped where opposing currents of qi met. Xiaoyao kept his survey notebook ready. The safe lanes he had marked were already filling with disciples pushing toward the dais.
Five thousand elite cultivators surrounded the stone dais. Disciples gripped their swords. Elders stroked their beards and calculated who would die first.
On the offering terrace, two men shouted at each other like subcontractors fighting over a shared dumpster.
Grand Elder Qi of the Heavenly Dao Alliance stood on the left. He was at the peak of Golden Core, dressed in white cloud-silk and holding a jade star compass and a seven-star fly-whisk. Three hundred disciples chanted behind him, feeding his golden aura.
Young Master Xie of the Blood-Nether Demon Sect stood opposite. Black-dragon armor covered his shoulders, and his skin was pale as putty. His curved blood-saber dripped red vapor that pitted the stone. Two hundred demonic berserkers waited behind him with bone spears.
“Our Alliance spent sixty years calculating this conjunction!” Qi shouted. “We hold the First Imperial Void Token, handed down by our founders. We enter first. Anyone who objects defies Heaven!”
“Save your sermon for your funeral,” Xie snarled. “We paid for our Dragon-Bone Key with the blood of an entire dragon-whale pod. The strong take what they want. Step ahead of us, and I’ll make drumheads from your skin.”
Their pressure collided. Golden light struck crimson smoke, and cracks spread through the terrace. Swords left their sheaths.
One more insult would start a massacre.
Then came the steady sound of steel-toed boots.
Clomp. Clomp. Clomp.
Austin walked up the stairs with his clipboard under one arm and his pipe wrench over the other shoulder. Xiaoyao followed with a toolbox and the surveyor’s tripod. He nodded politely to the berserkers as if he were reporting for an ordinary Monday shift.
Pug ambled after them, yawning with all three heads. He sniffed a battle standard made from tanned human skin, sneezed, and burned off its tassels with a stray spark. The standard-bearer shook so hard that his spear rattled against his armor.
Austin walked through the drawn blades and stepped between Qi and Xie.
“Excuse me, guys. Just need to reach the panel.”
Xie’s war cry died in his throat. Qi’s fly-whisk stopped in midair.
Austin kept walking to the bottom-right corner of the gate. He put on his wire-rimmed glasses and switched on his headlamp. White light cut through the incense smoke.
His system displayed a green outline of the door.
Austin studied the screen. He looked up at the carved gears that generations of scholars had measured and copied. Then he tapped them with his grease pencil.
Clack. Clack.
There was no space behind the teeth. They were part of a solid casting. None of them connected to a shaft.
Austin gave a dry laugh.
“Decorative molding. Some stonecarver added these three thousand years ago to make the door look impressive. Fifty thousand people have been camping in the dirt without checking whether the gears actually move anything.”
The terrace went still.
Qi’s mouth fell open. Xie’s blood-saber sagged.
Five thousand cultivators stared at Austin, then at the carvings. The idea was too simple to fit inside ten thousand years of sacred scholarship.
Xie recovered first. Purple veins rose in his neck as he leveled his saber at Austin’s face.
“You filthy peasant! You dare touch the gate of the First Gods with your greasy hands? This platform belongs to the chosen prodigies! Kneel and beat your head against the stone, or I’ll feed your guts to my war crows!”
Austin did not look at the blade trembling near his eyebrow. He watched the acid dripping from its edge onto the bronze threshold.
“First, you’re dumping acid on load-bearing metal. Second, you’re blocking an emergency exit. Town building code section ten-point-two requires a thirty-six-inch clear path in front of the door. No crates, no banners, and no idiots waving bare steel. Back up so I can reach the reader.”
“You called me an idiot? You cite fire exits to me? I am the young master of the Blood-Nether—”
Qi pushed forward and cut him off with a wave of his whisk.
“Ignorant mortal. This gate answers only to the Three Moons and ninety-nine Void Spirit Jade Tokens. Even a Nascent Soul ancestor cannot scratch it. How could a laborer with a plumber’s wrench open it?”
The crowd burst into laughter.
“A clown in work jeans thinks he’s a locksmith!”
“He’s going to turn the wheels of heaven with his blue wrench!”
Austin did not argue. He unfastened his canvas rucksack and reached into the padded lining.
He lifted out a twelve-inch matte-black cube: the First Epoch Machine End-post Screen Root Core.
The cube was heavy in his gloved hands. Thin cyan lines pulsed along its seams. A low hum came from inside, and every jade talisman within thirty paces began to buzz.
Qi’s eyes bulged. “What manner of black brick is that?”
Xie lowered his saber. The cube gave off no spiritual qi at all, and that unsettled him more than a powerful aura would have.
Austin stepped past the blade and approached a dark glass plate set into the bronze frame. Salt and dust almost hid the old serial label.
UNDERGROUND RESEARCH VAULT 04 — EXTERIOR EGRESS PORTAL B
He wiped the glass clean with his sleeve, then glanced back at the crowd.
“Three days of calculations for a lunar conjunction?” He snorted. “Pal, that’s just the loading screen.”
He pressed the root end-post against the reader.
BEEP.