Steward Qian didn't stop at fifty planks.
The merchant rolled up the mountain path before mid-afternoon leading a sweating, wide-eyed pack of eight senior sect deacons. They were bent double under two hundred massive slabs of ancient Dragon-Vein Spirit Pine, ten iron-strapped chests of cold-forged spirit nails, four heavy copper-plated cedar doors inlaid with river pearl, and a complete chest of gold-leaf master carpentry planes and draw knives.
The eight deacons dumped the entire cargo at the perimeter boundary in under six minutes. They dropped to their knees, bounced their foreheads off the quartz gravel until blood showed, and bolted back down the ridge like hounds running from a brushfire.
Austin stood on the edge of his leveled courtyard, running a calloused palm along the top pine timber.
"Now that's what I call prompt delivery," Austin muttered, admiring the golden grain. "Kiln-dried. Straight as a laser level. Zero crown, zero cup, zero twist. Good customer service. That old alchemist must have flagged my account for VIP vendor perks."
He spat into the weeds, rolled up his frayed hemp sleeves, and grabbed an iron-headed framing mallet.
"Time to demo this fire hazard."
For the next four hours, the steady, rhythmic racket of heavy timber framing rolled across Sunset Peak: *Thwack. Tap. Tap. SQUEEEEAK. Thud.*
Austin tore into the sagging shack like a wrecking crew with a deadline. He ripped out the rotten, beetle-chewed thatch in armfuls, tossing the buggy straw into the brush for compost. He put his shoulder into the corner posts, found two of them rotted out at the ground line from ground-contact moisture, and levered them out with a crowbar. In their place, he hoisted massive six-by-six timbers of Dragon-Vein Pine, plumbed them with a weighted string, and spiked them to the sill plates.
His `/ignite_hearth` macro made child's play of the fasteners. Whenever a three-inch nail hit dense ironwood grain, Austin pushed a quick jolt of twelve-hundred-degree thermal energy through the iron head. The metal softened just enough to drive home flush with a single swing, heat-treating the surrounding wood fibers against rot and fusing the shank tight into the grain.
He checked diagonals from corner to corner. Perfect square. Every tongue-and-groove joint clicked home with an airtight friction seal.
By late afternoon, the miserable squatter's lean-to was history.
In its place sat a clean, double-walled timber cabin built from heavy amber pine. The air around the clearing smelled of warm turpentine, rich mountain resin, and sun-baked pitch. A broad covered porch wrapped the eastern and southern walls, complete with a hand-planed railing, a stout bench, and a solid plank door hung on heavy iron butt hinges that latched shut with a deep, pressurized *thud*.
Austin smeared sawdust and sweat off his forehead with the back of his forearm. He dropped onto the fresh porch bench, leaned his head against the fragrant wall, and let out a long, satisfied contractor's groan.
"Finally. A proper starter base. No cross-breezes freezing your kidneys. No wood-spiders dropping down your shirt collar while you sleep. Solid load-bearing headers."
At the bottom of the porch steps, Li Xiaoyao had been watching the entire build with his mouth hanging wide open.
To the boy's spiritual senses, Austin had been conducting an act of cosmic architecture.
Every single swing of that iron mallet had resonated in sync with the deep, subterranean dragon pulses of the continent. The interlocking mortise joints formed a terrifying **Nine-Heavens Void-Sealing Array** built to deflect thunderbolts from the heavenly thrones—a sacred sovereign bastion humming with divine equilibrium!
Li Xiaoyao threw himself onto his knees, planting his forehead squarely against the obsidian flagstones.
"Master!" the teenager cried out, his voice shaking with raw, desperate reverence. "This disciple begs to be formally taken into your hall! I have no great clan lineage. My spirit roots are common weed-roots. But my heart is true! Even if I am only fit to sweep dead leaves from your altar steps, let me study the True Dao at your side!"
Austin rested his chin in his palm, studying the kid through his system overlay.
Austin rubbed his jaw, feeling the scratch of several days' stubble.
"Listen, kid," Austin sighed. "The dev build doesn't even have a functioning guild menu yet. I can't send you a party invite, and there isn't a class trainer within fifty miles to assign you a trade. But if you want to hang around the compound and keep that passive companion buff active, you need to understand the golden rule of site maintenance."
Li Xiaoyao snapped his head up, his eyes shining with holy thirst. "Instruct this disciple, Master! Whatever sacred decree you impart, Xiaoyao will burn every syllable into his marrow!"
Austin reached down, grabbed a worn bamboo broom leaning against the new pine post, and slapped the handle into the boy's open palms.
"Take this broom," Austin said, deadpan and solemn. "Base performance is all about memory management. When loose gravel, dried leaves, and dropped item entities pile up across your loaded chunks, the engine wastes precious CPU cycles calculating dynamic collision boxes for every single pebble. You get micro-stutters. Frame drops. Eventually, you end up with a fatal memory leak that crashes the entire zone."
Li Xiaoyao stared down at the split-bamboo bristles, his chest seizing with breathless terror.
*Memory leaks?! Dynamic collision calculations?! Frame drops?!*
*The Master is revealing the deepest mysteries of the Great Void! The karmic debris of the red dust world that pollutes the pure Dao Heart! Every mundane distraction forces the soul to calculate unnecessary earthly desires, causing a cultivator's link to Heaven to stutter and collapse into demonic possession!*
"So," Austin continued, pointing two fingers toward the courtyard. "You sweep this obsidian deck twice a day. Dawn and dusk. And don't try to get fancy. Don't do any wuxia spin kicks, and don't swing it around like you're fighting three guys in an alley. Just focus on one clean, mechanical stroke: push the loose trash off the edge in a straight vector. Clear the cache. Keep the frame rate smooth. Got it?"
Li Xiaoyao's knuckles turned white around the bamboo pole.
*Clear the cache... Keep the frame rate smooth...*
*This is the Ancient Void Cleansing Sword Dao!* Enlightenment crashed through the boy's mind like a tidal wave. *True swordsmanship rejects flashy acrobatics and theatrical flourishes! The ultimate sword is a single, unhesitating stroke that sweeps away the illusions of the mortal realm!*
Tears of profound cosmic understanding streamed down the boy's cheeks, splashing onto the obsidian mirror beneath his knees.
"Disciple understands!" Xiaoyao whispered, rising to his feet with an eerie, centered calm. The awkwardness had vanished from his stance. His shoulders hung loose, completely aligned with the rhythm of his lungs. "Clear the cache... sweep away the falsehood!"
He turned toward the open courtyard.
He took a slow, deep breath, tasting pine resin and ozone.
Then, shifting his weight through his hips, Li Xiaoyao drove the bamboo broom forward in a simple, flat stroke.
*SWISH.*
A casual sweep through empty air.
The atmospheric pressure before the broom snapped with a high-pitched, metallic shriek! A paper-thin crescent of compressed, transparent sword intent ripped across thirty yards of open courtyard!
*CRACK!*
Fifty paces past the perimeter line, an ancient granite boulder the size of a two-car garage split cleanly in two.
The massive halves slid apart along a fault line as smooth as polished plate glass, thundering down the slope into the underbrush with an earthquake roar that set the pine trees rattling.
Austin, who was taking a sip of well water from a fresh cedar cup on the porch, paused with the rim at his lip.
He looked at the sliced fifty-ton boulder. Then he looked at Li Xiaoyao, who stood peacefully in the yard, leaning lightly against his broom with a blissful, serene smile.
Austin slowly lowered the cup.
"Well, look at that," Austin murmured, nodding once in mild approval. "The devs even rigged up an idle cosmetic particle effect for the companion sweeping animation. Good ambient polish. A little heavy on the terrain destruction physics, but it adds nice visual flavor to the yard chores."
***
Five miles away, inside the stone-walled ancestral keep of the Bai Clan, the atmosphere smelled of cold iron and impending slaughter.
"WORTHLESS BUMS! USELESS, SPINELESS COWARDS!"
Patriarch Bai Tian, a Peak Foundation Establishment warlord whose bronze skin had been scarred by eighty years of border skirmishes, drove his bare fist into a solid marble pillar. The stone exploded into chalky powder, sending hairline cracks spidering up toward the roof beams.
Young Master Bai Chen was kneeling on the cold flagstones, soaked in sweat, shivering so hard his knees banged together.
"Father! By our ancestors' graves, I'm telling the truth!" Bai Chen stammered, raising trembling hands. "Elder Mu has completely lost his mind! He ate a charred radish scrap from that cripple's hand and jumped two full realms to Peak Golden Core right before our eyes! And that beggar paid Steward Qian with a solid ten-pound bar of Nine-Yang Sun-Gold! He's sitting on an ancient imperial treasury!"
Bai Tian's slit-like eyes flared with ruthless, predatory lust.
He turned toward the heavy iron rack behind the clan dais. His thick, calloused fingers closed around the sharkskin grip of the **Heaven-Iron Cleaving Sword**—a fifth-rank ancestral relic passed down through seven generations of Bai Clan warlords.
"Ten pounds of Nine-Yang Sun-Gold..." Bai Tian rumbled, his deep voice vibrating like an iron boiler under pressure. "With that wealth, our clan could buy our own spirit mountain, sever ties with the Clear Sky Sect, and reign as an independent power for a thousand years! Elder Mu was bewitched by a hallucinatory spirit array. That dying cripple is running on borrowed time!"
Bai Tian ripped the massive black blade from its scabbard with an ear-splitting rasp of steel.
"Mobilize the three hundred armored iron cavalry!" Bai Tian roared, his voice echoing off the stone walls. "Mount the heavy siege ballistas! Tomorrow at first light, we march on Sunset Peak! I don't care what kind of trick illusions that dog has rigged up... beneath my Heaven-Iron Cleaving Sword, all mortal flesh bleeds!"