The descending blade split the sky like a tear through ancient silk.
A howling vortex of black-and-crimson blade qi spiraled downward, devouring the light of the sun and turning the suspended raindrops into boiling steam.
Space groaned under the sheer physical mass of the petrified leviathan spine.
The pressure alone was enough to crush a lesser sect into powdered gravel.
Patriarch Ao Cang roared as he fell, his draconic talons locked onto the jagged hilt of the Ancestral Dragon-Slaying Blade.
Every vein in his massive forearms bulged with primordial divine power.
For one hundred thousand years, this weapon had drunk the marrow of continental monarchs.
Today, it would butcher the arrogant human who had reduced the scions of the True Dragon Race to porch-dwelling lizards!
"PERISH, FOOLISH MORTAL!" Ao Cang bellowed, the sound shaking the tectonic roots of the mountain. "YOUR VERY KARMA SHALL BE STRIPPED FROM THE WHEEL OF REINCARNATION!"
Lyra Ashford’s hand flew to the hilt of her silver rapier.
Her knees buckled under the immense, suffocating gravitational shear.
The air smelled of ozone, scorched iron, and abyssal blood.
*This isn't an attack,* Lyra realized in horror. *This is an extinction event!*
*A First-Era Primordial God-Relic falling at terminal velocity!*
*Even a thousand Saint-tier defensive arrays would be sheared in two like wet rice paper!*
She glanced desperately toward Felix.
Felix Vance sat slumped in his wooden chair, holding the AetherDeck horizontally with both thumbs.
He didn't draw a weapon. He didn't even adjust his posture.
The obsidian surface of the slate lit up with a clean, low-power green glow as the camera sensor on the top bezel pinged the approaching black mass.
A notification window popped up across the middle of the display:
Felix blinked at the prompt.
He tilted the screen slightly to get a better look through the falling drizzle.
His passive Inspector HUD flared over the descending twenty-foot draconic giant, projecting a small floating tooltip right beside the massive, jagged greatsword:
【Item: Ancestral Dragon-Slaying Blade】 【Quality: Heavily Corroded / Prehistoric Scrap】 【Durability: 12/100,000 (Severe Structural Fatigue)】 【Inspector Note: A massive, rusted-looking slab of calcified bone and prehistoric slag. Highly noisy, poor ergonomic balance, and dangerously close to private residential airspace. Contains zero aesthetic value and generates massive framerate stutter. Yields standard refined iron ingots upon molecular breakdown. Recommend immediate one-click recycling to free up local cache memory.】
Felix let out an annoyed breath through his nose.
"Twelve durability left?" Felix muttered under his breath, shaking his head with mild disgust. "And it's ninety-eight percent rusted iron slag? Who brings broken starter-zone junk into someone else's front yard?"
He looked up at the sky.
The colossal black blade was now less than a hundred yards above the cedar roof.
The crimson lightning crackling across its serrated edge was close enough to reflect off Felix's pale gray hemp trousers.
The wind whipped against the hem of his yellow dragon-scale poncho, flapping the waterproof fabric with a steady *thwap-thwap-thwap*.
Patriarch Ao Cang’s eyes flared with savage, vindictive triumph.
"YOU SIT MOTIONLESS IN TERROR!" Ao Cang roared, his voice deafening. "ACCEPT YOUR EXECUTION BENEATH THE WRATH OF THE ABYSS!"
Felix didn't even blink.
"Honestly, the inventory clutter in these open-world survival games is completely out of hand," Felix grumbled.
He raised his right thumb.
He pressed the glowing `[ CONFIRM ]` button on the glass screen.
*Tap.*
A crisp, high-pitched digital chime echoed across the porch:
*Ding!*
The universe did not explode.
There was no deafening boom of colliding divine laws.
There was no blinding flash of holy aether.
The ten-mile-long Ancestral Dragon-Slaying Blade simply vanished.
One millisecond, it was a terrifying, space-rending monument of primordial slaughter descending at three thousand miles per hour.
The next millisecond, it ceased to exist.
*Pop.*
The dark-matter vortex dissolved into thin air.
The black-and-crimson lightning fizzled out like a blown candle wick.
The crushing, bone-grinding gravitational pressure that had pinned the entire mountain range disappeared so instantly that the air pressure inside Ao Cang’s chest popped violently.
Patriarch Ao Cang’s talons snapped together, clutching absolute, empty nothingness.
His downward momentum, stripped entirely of the massive weapon's stabilizing inertia, tumbled wildly out of control.
"WHAT—?!"
Ao Cang flailed his massive arms, spinning like a top through the empty airspace before crashing face-first into the soggy clover lawn fifty feet in front of the porch.
*THUMP!*
Mud and torn grass flew in every direction.
The twenty-foot draconic titan skidded through the dirt, plowing a twelve-foot trench through the lawn before coming to a halt on his stomach.
His horned head popped out of the mud, spitting dirt and grass roots.
"MY BLADE?!" Ao Cang roared, his voice cracking into a high-pitched draconic shriek. "WHERE IS THE ANCESTRAL WYRM-CLEAVING RELIC?!"
He scrambled to his knees, clawing frantically at the empty air, then at the dirt beneath him.
"WHERE IS IT?! DID YOU EXILE IT TO THE CHAOTIC VOID?! DID YOU SHATTER IT WITH AN IMMORTAL PALM?!"
A soft, metallic clatter broke the silence.
Right beside Ao Cang’s right knee, sitting neatly in the wet clover, was a tidy, rectangular pyramid of grey metal ingots.
Each ingot was approximately eight inches long, four inches wide, and stamped with a small, cheerful pixel hammer icon on top.
There were ten of them, stacked three on the bottom, three in the middle, and four on top, completely clean and free of rust.
A tiny system line scrolled across Felix's AetherDeck:
Felix stared down at the screen, his mouth tightening into a slight frown.
"Five hundred units?" Felix muttered, clearly dissatisfied. "That slab was the size of a city bus, and the exchange rate only gave me ten basic iron bars? The scrap vendor in this system is a total scam artist."
He tapped the screen to close the window, slipping the slate back into his poncho pocket.
Up on his brass perch, Barnaby the clockwork owl let out a series of frantic, muffled clicks.
*Whirrr-click-clack!*
The black rubber stopper prevented any pompous screeching, but the owl's brass head spun three hundred and sixty degrees on its neck bearing in pure mechanical bewilderment.
His amber crystal lenses rapidly zoomed in and out, trying to calculate the mathematical impossibility of forty thousand tons of divine metal collapsing into ten neat iron ingots.
Along the porch railing, the three azure flood dragons slowly uncoiled their trembling bodies.
They peeked over the painted cedar rail, their golden eyes wide as saucers as they looked at the neat stack of iron bars sitting in the mud.
*Puff...*
One of the azure dragons let out a tiny, dazed puff of warm steam from its nostrils, blinking in utter disbelief.
Their ancestral patriarch—the terrifying legend spoken of in ancient nursery rhymes to frighten young hatchlings—had just been stripped of his supreme relic without a single drop of blood being shed.
Lyra Ashford stood frozen against the porch railing.
Her pupils were dilated to the size of pinpricks.
Her mind struggled to process what her eyes had just witnessed.
*He... he didn't parry it,* Lyra thought, her soul shuddering with such violent force she could feel her golden core vibrating against her ribs.
*He didn't deflect it.*
*He didn't even use a defensive barrier.*
*He simply looked at an ancient First-Era Divine Relic... a weapon steeped in the slaughter of ten thousand dragon monarchs... and categorized it as scrap metal!*
*With a single gesture of his finger, he disassembled the conceptual laws of the weapon!*
*He stripped away its karma, dissolved its primordial soul-blood, and compressed its physical existence into mortal trade ingots!*
*To Senior Brother, the supreme wrath of the Dragon Realm is nothing more than unrefined raw material for his daily chores!*
*This is the terrifying Dao of Material Reformation!*
*He does not conquer weapons... he refactors reality itself!*
Down on the lawn, Patriarch Ao Cang crawled over to the neat stack of grey ingots.
His massive, trembling talons hovered over the metal bars.
He could feel a faint, lingering echo of primordial leviathan bone deep inside the molecular structure of the top ingot.
The soul of the god-weapon was still there, but all of its malice, all of its killing intent, and all of its apocalyptic glory had been completely bleached away.
It was just iron.
Dull, uniform, perfectly forged iron.
"No..." Ao Cang whimpered, his voice trembling like a frightened child. "One hundred thousand years... forged in the fires of the deep trench... quenched in the tears of heaven..."
He looked up at the young man sitting on the porch.
Felix Vance was casually brushing a speck of dried grass off his yellow poncho.
He picked up his porcelain teacup again, taking another gentle sip of 68.5°C roasted barley tea.
*Slurp.*
"Hey," Felix called down, pointing toward the mud trench Ao Cang had plowed through the lawn. "Next time you decide to jump out of a cloud, watch where you land. Lord Nether-Bane spent three hours raking that clover yesterday. You're tracking mud everywhere."
Ao Cang’s heart felt as though it had been dropped into a lake of absolute zero liquid ice.
The human didn't view him as a threat.
The human didn't even view him as an enemy.
The human viewed him as an irresponsible trespasser making a mess of the yard!
Underneath Felix's chair, the little emerald wyrm poked its snout out from beneath the poncho fringe.
Seeing its terrifying ancestral patriarch covered in mud and whimpering before a stack of iron bars, the little wyrm let out a cheerful, chirping burp:
*Chirp!*
It happily crawled out from under the chair, trotted over to the broken gutter drip, and went right back to catching rainwater drops on its tongue.
*Plop. Gulp.*
Ao Cang stared at his infant descendant.
Then he stared at the neat stack of iron bars.
Then he looked at Felix, who was squinting thoughtfully at the leaking cedar roof.
The ancient Dragon Patriarch’s 100,000-year-old Dao heart gave a loud, hollow crack.
"What..." Ao Cang whispered, his red eyes completely dull with existential ruin. "What kind of monster are you?"
Felix sighed, setting his cup down.
"Just a guy who needs to fix his roof," Felix said.