Beyond the reinforced titanium blast doors of Sector 2 lay the most infamous deathtrap in the entire thousand-year history of the Continental Border Rift: **The Nine-Yang Void Flame Trial**.
In the sacred scrolls of the three hundred southern and western cultivation sects, elders wrote of this chamber with trembling ink.
According to sect scripture, the ancient First Gods had channeled the pure solar essence of nine dying stars into a hundred-meter basin of white-hot, soul-melting void fire. To pass this trial, ancient seekers stripped off their armor, stepped into the molten lake, and sat in full lotus meditation for thirty-six unbroken days and nights.
Their skin blistered. Their flesh sloughed away. Their meridians burned down to glowing spirit threads, and their Golden Cores cooked in thermal agony. Only those who achieved the mythical *Indestructible Vajra Solar Physique* walked out alive. Over forty-eight peak Golden Core patriarchs and half-step Nascent Soul elders had turned into handfuls of white ash in this very room, their spatial rings melted into slag.
Austin stood on the observation catwalk, leaning his forearms on the safety railing and looking down into the blinding basin.
A hundred meters of bubbling, blinding white-orange plasma rolled across heavy floor grating, churning at temperatures high enough to liquefy tungsten. Waves of blistering heat rolled upward, twisting the air into shimmering mirages.
Above the steel archway, a chipped First Epoch placard hung by two rusted rivets, painted in heat-resistant red enamel:
**[SECTOR 03: HIGH-TEMPERATURE FLUE GAS SCRUBBING & THERMAL RUNAWAY EXHAUST VENT]** **[DANGER: INDUSTRIAL INCINERATOR EXHAUST FLUE. CONTINUOUS OPERATING TEMP: 4,500°C.]** **[DO NOT ATTEMPT TO TRAVERSE HEATED FLOOR GRATING. PERSONNEL MUST USE OVERHEAD SERVICE BYPASS DUCT B-4.]**
Austin pulled up his system HUD, scanning the thermal profile.
Austin lowered his clipboard, scowling with deep, professional disgust.
"Are you kidding me?" Austin muttered, tapping his yellow grease pencil against his hard hat. "They left the plant incinerator exhaust running on standby for ten thousand years? Who approved this layout? Walking through a four-thousand-degree slag dump isn't a test of spiritual fortitude. It’s an OSHA Level 1 deadly workplace hazard. My rubber boot treads would melt off in sixty seconds."
Li Xiaoyao stepped up beside him, throwing a sleeve across his face as sweat immediately poured down his neck. The boy's knees trembled:
"S-Senior... this is the holy Nine-Yang Void Flame! Legend holds that Grand Patriarch Crimson Sun sat in this very fire for thirty-six days, coughing three bowls of blood daily until his bones turned to golden jade! Do we... do we need to strip down and begin the thirty-six-day soul-refining chant?"
"Strip down and sit in a dirty exhaust flue?" Austin looked at Xiaoyao as if the boy had suggested eating dry drywall mud. "What kind of masochistic speedrun strat is that? You think I'm going to waste thirty-six days AFK-meditating in a smoky chimney pipe while my boots melt? We have an afternoon schedule to keep."
Austin pointed his yellow grease pencil straight up.
Twenty-five feet above the roaring lake of fire, bolted to the reinforced granite ceiling, hung a massive, rectangular galvanized steel ductwork trunk—three feet wide by four feet high—running the entire length of the chamber from the intake wall straight to the exit gantry.
Stenciled in faded black spray paint across the access hatch was a single label:
**[MAINTENANCE SERVICE ACCESS: DUCT B-4]**
"Look up," Austin said, resting his five-foot Stellar-Steel pipe wrench across his shoulder. "Standard commercial HVAC return-air duct. Suspended ten feet above the rising heat layer. Cold, filtered air. Zero floor contact."
Li Xiaoyao stared up at the ductwork hanging above the roaring inferno, mouth agape:
"A... a celestial bridge in the high heavens? But Senior, the ancient array formations forbid flying! Anyone who leaps into the air in this sacred hall is struck down by the Nine-Sky Suppression Array!"
"Who's flying?" Austin snorted. "It's an air-conditioning trunk. It's structural framing. It’s part of the ceiling envelope."
Austin glanced down at the motor-control panel bolted beside the access ladder.
The three-phase four-hundred-eighty-volt starter that operated the exhaust dampers was a total disaster. The metal enclosure was split wide open, ungrounded control wiring spilling out like dry spaghetti. An ancient cultivator had driven a charred bone stake straight between the starter's contactors, forcing the high-voltage circuit to remain permanently energized.
"Look at this starter box," Austin grumbled, shaking his head. "Three-phase breaker jammed shut with a bone wedge. No overload relays. No disconnect switch. And look at the runic carvings around the door frame—that's not a flight suppression array, kid. That's an un-grounded electrostatic precipitator. Because nobody bonded the frame to earth ground, the whole ceiling holds an unmetered static charge. If you jump into the air, you complete the circuit and get arc-flashed. Shoddy work from start to finish."
Austin unclipped his **50-Ton Portable Hydraulic Bottle Jack** from his tool belt and walked over to the structural ladder mounted against the wall. The lower ten feet had been retracted into a locked steel sleeve.
"Rusted locking pin," Austin diagnosed. "Ten thousand years of deferred maintenance."
Austin slid the base of the 50-ton hydraulic jack between the ladder bracket and the steel wall plate. He slotted the pump handle into the sleeve and pumped with rhythmic, heavy strokes:
*Chk-chk-chk-chk.*
Hydraulic fluid hissed through the internal seals. The hardened steel piston extended against the frozen iron bracket:
*CRUNCH-SNAP!*
The ancient shear pin snapped in two. The heavy steel maintenance ladder clattered downward with a ringing metallic crash: *CLANG!*
"Access ladder deployed," Austin announced, wiping a fleck of grease from the jack's relief valve. "Pug, you're on vanguard. Xiaoyao, grab the spare tool rucksack. Sequence-breaking rule number one: never walk the intended developer path when the ceiling duct has no collision barriers."
Cerberus Pug barked three happy, muffled barks—*Woof, ruff, arf!*—and trotted up the rungs on four massive paws. Squeezing his eight-hundred-pound frame into the rectangular opening of Duct B-4, Pug looked like a gigantic, black-scaled loaf of sourdough sliding into an oven.
Xiaoyao swallowed hard, gripped his spirit sword, and climbed up behind the dog.
Austin followed last, using his pipe wrench handle to hook the heavy steel hatch and pull it firmly shut behind them: *CLANG-THUMP.*
Inside Duct B-4, the air was cool, smelling of dried dust, First Epoch Freon, and old zinc. Below the heavy sheet-metal floor, the lake of Nine-Yang Void Flames rumbled like distant surf, but inside the duct, thick acoustic fiberglass insulation absorbed ninety-eight percent of the radiant heat.
"See?" Austin’s voice echoed cleanly inside the duct, his hard hat LED cutting through the dark. "Heavy-duty fiberglass insulation. Rated for continuous industrial thermal loads. You could roast a pig on the floor grates below, and up here it feels like early October in Oregon."
Austin dropped to his hands and knees, crawling forward with steady, practiced rhythm.
*Thump-thump, scrape-scrape.*
Beneath his shins, his one hundred and twelve orbital particles whirled in tight, compressed orbits, sweeping away loose dust and cobwebs before his knees touched the sheet metal.
Right ahead of him, Pug’s thick fur brushed against an exposed patch of yellow fiberglass lagging.
Microscopic glass fibers drifted into the air.
Pug’s three black noses twitched violently. His six ruby eyes flared wide.
Then came the chain reaction:
*Achoo!* sneezed the left head!
*Ker-tchoo!* sneezed the middle head!
*SNORT-CHUFF!* sneezed the right head!
The triple sneeze blasted through the enclosed metal duct like a shotgun blast! Pug’s heavy heads snapped back, clattering against the top sheet metal: *BANG-RATTLE!* His three bushy tails drummed a frantic rhythm against the duct floor: *thump-thump-thump-thump!*
"Bless you, boy," Austin chuckled, patting Pug's muscular flank. "Keep moving. Don't inhale the yellow fluff."
A few yards further, Pug spotted an old bundle of black nylon Panduit cable ties dangling from a duct hanger bracket. The hound’s middle head immediately latched onto the plastic tails, gnawing with contented rubbery squeaks while army-crawling forward on his belly: *squeak, crunch, chomp.*
Fifty meters down the trunk, Austin suddenly stopped.
"Senior?" Xiaoyao whispered, tense. "Is there an ancient killing formation ahead?"
"Worse," Austin muttered, shining his headlamp on a clogged intake register. "Look at this primary air filter. Clogged solid with three inches of petrified slag lint. Static pressure in this return line must be completely choked. Criminal negligence."
Austin unclipped a stiff-bristle wire brush from his tool belt. For ninety seconds, he vigorously scrubbed the metal mesh until the galvanized wire shone bright and clean:
*Scritch-scratch-scritch-scratch!*
"There," Austin nodded, blowing away the dislodged lint with a sharp puff. "Airflow restored. The plant's HVAC static pressure just dropped three inches of water column."
Li Xiaoyao stared in silent, religious disbelief.
*The Senior is traversing the sacred Nine-Yang Void Flame Trial... through an overhead metal tube... and stopped to polish the breathing grates of the wind spirits because he found their passage untidy?!*
Austin crawled forward another forty meters.
Ahead, clean white light spilled through the end of the ductwork.
Austin reached the exit register, pressed his wrench against the four quarter-turn Dzus fasteners, and twisted each ninety degrees—*Click, click, click, click.* He kicked the louvered grille outward!
*THUD!*
Austin scrambled out, dropping twelve feet to the solid granite floor of the Sector 3 exit platform. His steel-toed boots absorbed the impact with a clean, muffled flex:
*Clomp.*
Cerberus Pug squeezed out after him, landing with a heavy canine thud. The hound shook all three heads, sneezed once more to clear his sinuses—*Ker-chuff!*—and wagged his tails.
Li Xiaoyao dropped down last, stumbling slightly before finding his balance. He turned around, staring through the thick quartz observation window at the roaring hundred-meter lake of white-hot fire they had completely bypassed.
The entire trip had taken less than ten minutes.
Beside the exit blast door, the First Epoch diagnostic screen lit up with vibrant green runes, chiming in triumph:
*BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-WHIRRRR!*
Li Xiaoyao looked at the terminal, then down at his pristine, uncharred silk robes. His hands shook:
"Thirty-six days of flesh-melting torment... bypassed in nine minutes through an air duct... and the First Gods gave him bonus merits for cleaning the filter..."
Austin put his wire brush away, dusted off his denim knees, and checked his pocket watch.
"Nine minutes and forty-two seconds," Austin smiled. "Clean routing. No potion use, zero boot sole degradation, and we didn't waste a single hour."
He snapped his grease pencil against his clipboard.
Deep within his dantian, the ambient thermal radiation absorbed during the crawl reached critical mass, triggering a blinding golden resonance!