Lu Yan’s left eye twitched with such violent intensity that his vision blurred with veins of red.
In his right hand, the five-foot Silver Frost Viper Rapier trembled, the razor-sharp tip buzzing like an angry hornet.
“Decorative sheet metal...?” Lu Yan’s voice rose to a shrill, frantic pitch that echoed off the granite cliffs of the quarry. “You call my old family blade decorative sheet metal?! This weapon was forged by an One-Star Master Blacksmith of the Capital! It’s hardened with the marrow of a Silver-Scaled Viper and cost eight hundred middle-grade spirit stones!”
“Eight hundred spirit stones for unannealed martensite?” Frank asked, taking a pencil from behind his ear and twirling it between his knuckles. “You didn’t just get scammed, kid. You got taken to the cleaners, hung out to dry, and folded into a discount bin.”
Behind Lu Yan, the fifty senior freshmen shifted uneasily, exchanging confused glances.
None of them understood what “unannealed martensite” meant, but the total, relaxed confidence in Lu Zhen’s voice was profoundly unsettling.
Frank activated his Combat Profiler.
Frank glanced at the floating system window, sighed, and shook his head.
“Eighteen frames of startup delay because you’re flaring your right elbow,” Frank muttered, loud enough for the front row of students to hear. “And your balance point is fully pitched forward onto your right toe. If whatever you hit doesn’t yield, all that dropping heavy rush has nowhere to go except straight back up your radius into your shoulder socket. It’s bad kinematics, kid.”
“Shut your mouth! Die!”
Lu Yan’s sanity snapped fully.
A blinding flare of silver wind-qi erupted from his feet, shredding the dirt beneath his boots into a cloud of dust. He leaped forward, covering twenty feet in a split second, his body twisting like a coiling serpent!
“Seven-Point Viper Thrust: Heart Piercer!”
The Silver Frost Viper Rapier screamed through the air, trailing six illusory afterimages of whistling wind-blades, converging into a single lethal needle of silver light aimed straight at Lu Zhen’s throat!
The fifty freshmen cheered in savage excitement. At this speed, an unranked mortal teacher would be pinned to the doorframe before he could blink!
Frank didn’t even shift his weight. He didn’t blink. He didn’t raise his hands.
Because behind him, an unmoving shadow had already stepped forward.
THUD.
A heavy, bare foot planted itself into the shale gravel directly in front of Frank.
Shen Shitou appeared like a mountain emerging from the morning fog.
His towering, bronze-skinned frame fully blocked the morning sun. He cast a vast shadow over Lu Yan’s charging form.
Shitou didn’t swing his twenty-pound demolition sledgehammer. He didn’t adopt an ornate defensive stance.
He simply raised his bare left forearm horizontally across his chest. He locked his wrist at a ninety-degree angle, grounding his heels into the bedrock exactly as charted in Figure 14 of the butcher paper blueprints.
CLANGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!
An ear-splitting, bell-like blast wave blew up across the quarry ridge!
The sound was not the tearing of human flesh. It was the total, high-speed crash of two solid metalworking masses meeting at end-post speed!
The needle-sharp tip of the eight-hundred-spirit-stone Silver Frost Viper Rapier struck the center of Shen Shitou’s bare, bronze left forearm.
And then, physics carried out its verdict.
The star-forged silver-steel-heavy dark metal channels beneath Shitou’s skin possessed a yield strength rated for fifty thousand PSI of molten stellar star-fire.
The decorative silver dress sword possessed a brittle crystal-clear matrix cooled in cold river water.
KRAAA-SHHHH!
The four-foot silver blade didn’t bend. It didn’t pierce.
It shattered.
The dress sword blew up into more than thirty jagged, razor-sharp steel fragments, exploding outward in a circular halo of silver shrapnel that whistled through the air, embedding deeply into the surrounding pine trees and shredding the silk sleeves of the front-row freshmen!
At the exact same instant, the entire piled up driving force of Lu Yan’s forward lunge collided with an unbending, unmoving wall of solid star-steel.
Just as Frank’s frame-data audit had predicted, the striking force had nowhere to go.
BZZZZT-SNAP!
A comical row of clockwork failures rattled through Lu Yan’s stance!
The handle shook like a runaway jackhammer against his palm, numbing his fingers instantly. The blast wave shot up his forearm, popping his elbow out of posture and sending a violent jolt through his shoulder that left his right arm flopping like limp rope!
“AIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”
Lu Yan let loose a shrill shriek of sheer outrage and shock!
The backward recoil lifted his entire body off the ground. It threw him twenty feet backward through the air like a launched sack of flour.
He tumbled through the gravel, bounced twice across the shale, and crashed face-down into the puddle of mud directly beside the splintered courtyard gate. He grabbed his throbbing, sprained arm against his chest.
“My arm! My arm!” Lu Yan wailed, thrashing in the puddle. “My training! My sword! He broke my sword with his bare skin!”
Dead silence.
Total, choking, bone-chilling silence blanketed the ridge.
The fifty senior freshmen stood frozen like statues carved from ice. Their mouths hung open so wide their jaws nearly out-of-joint. Their eyes bulged with pure, pure horror.
They looked at Lu Yan. The premier sword prodigy of the Lu Clan, weeping and thrashing in the mud with a limp, sprained arm.
Then, they looked at Shen Shitou.
Shen Shitou stood on the path, his left arm still raised horizontally.
On his bare bronze forearm, directly where an eight-hundred-stone magical dress sword had struck with full killing intent, there was not a single drop of blood.
There was not a single cut.
There was only a faint, box-shaped white smudge. A tiny streak of chalky friction dust that Shitou casually wiped away with the cuff of his linen tunic.
Shitou looked down at his arm, then looked at the thrashing Lu Yan, his brow furrowing in deep, contemplative realization.
“Master...” Shitou turned around, bowing at a ninety-degree angle to Frank with fanatical respect. “Student understands Master’s deep design! Master didn’t order me to strike this clown because Master wished to use his sword as a load-bearing hardness gauge to test the pulling strength of my newly cleared channels!”
Beside him, Jiang Ling’er nodded with solemn, royal gravity. “Master’s foresight is truly terrifying. To use the full-strength strike of a Tier 1 Layer 8 prodigy merely as an untuned material hardness test... In Master’s eyes, the elite sword arts of the Lu Clan are nothing more than a carpenter’s scratch awl.”
Niu Mang leaned on his trench spade, nodding sagely. “Master said mass times gaining speed equals force. The little guy had no mass. He broke himself.”
Frank blinked.
He looked at Shitou’s arm, then looked at the three students who were busy constructing a holy temple out of a basic metalworking crash.
“I didn’t use him as a hardness gauge,” Frank said. He walked past Shitou with his hands in his pockets. “I told him his blade had brittle martensite. He didn’t listen.”
Frank strolled over to the puddle where Lu Yan was thrashing in agony.
He bent down, reached into the mud. Then he picked up a three-inch shard of the shattered silver blade between two calloused fingers.
Frank held the broken steel up to the morning sunlight, squinting at the cross-sectional fracture surface.
“Look at the crystal-clear grain boundary,” Frank said. He held the shard out toward the scared, trembling freshmen who were slowly backing away toward the bamboo grove.
“It’s fully coarse,” Frank explained in a calm, informative tone, like a shop teacher demonstrating why a student failed their metal shop midterm. “When you cool high-carbon steel in cold water without a backup low-heat tempering cycle, the internal crystal lattice is locked under total leftover stress. It looks shiny on the outside, but inside, it’s basically hardened glass.”
Frank tossed the metal shard into the mud beside Lu Yan’s bleeding nose.
“Next time you spend eight hundred spirit stones on hardware,” Frank advised the weeping young master, “ask the vendor for an approved metalworking test report and a three-year warranty against brittle fracture. Now, where are my forty copper coins for the gate hinge?”
Lu Yan choked on a mouthful of muddy water, his eyes rolling back in his head as he passed out from the combined sting of his sprained arm and sheer, unendurable humiliation.
The fifty senior freshmen shrieked in terror, dropping their sword sheaths, turning on their heels, and fleeing down the mountain path like startled quail, trampling over each other in their desperate scramble to escape Classroom 404!
Frank watched them vanish down the trail, shaking his head.
“Every single one of them had terrible running stance,” Frank noted. “Over-striding on the downhill, landing on their heels. Half of them are going to have shin splints by noon.”
Before Frank could turn back to his classroom, the air above the Hongwu Mountains suddenly began to tremble.
RUUUUUUUMBLE...
The morning mist was wildly torn apart by three massive. It spiraled vortexes of purple spiritual energy!
An ear-splitting, furious roar echoed across the sky. It shook with the terrifying, crushing power of the Qi Sea realm:
“Lu Zhen! You demonic dog! How dare you humiliate my nephew and destroy a royal clan’s old family sword?!”
Three towering figures clad in luxurious purple Elder robes dropped from the clouds atop swirling spiritual wind platforms, their auras streaming with the choking pressure of Mortal Tier 2!
In the center was Vice-Principal Lu Xun, his face twisted in homicidal rage. His eyes were locked onto his unconscious nephew lying in the mud!
Frank didn’t panic. He pulled out his pocket watch, checked the time. Then he looked up at the floating elders with a mild, tired frown.
“Two hours early for the check,” Frank muttered. He tucked the watch away and adjusting his denim shop apron. “And landing an unshielded spiritual flight platform directly over my freshly cleared drainage swale. That’s a Class-Three town erosion rule-break.”