The dropping hundred-foot sword beam turned the evening sky into a blinding expanse of blazing bright gold, lighting up every tiled roof and courtyard alley across the western commandery.
In neighboring manors, high-born guards slammed their courtyard shutters in terror. They whispered wild prayers to the heavens. Across Great Da-Qi, every sword fighter had heard the legend of the 4-Pattern Divine Sword. A blade that had cut the heads of demonic river serpents and split city gates during the War of Three Kingdoms. To face its direct overhead strike was regarded by the empire’s greatest masters as total, unavoidable suicide.
Yet inside the carriage house courtyard, the only sound that competed with the howling blade was the dry crunch of work boots shifting against loose stone.
The air pressure inside the carriage house courtyard spiked to fifteen sea-weights in a split second. Roof tiles on the surrounding stables shattered into airborne clay dust. The outer edge brick walls groaned as thousands of tiny cracks raced across the mortar. And the pea-gravel driveway rippled like water under the crushing moving weight.
Patriarch Shen Canghai’s eyes burned with crazed, old family triumph.
His entire Golden Core training was poured into the four dragon runes of the Great Da-Qi Divine Sword. In his mind, he could already hear the satisfying wet crunch of Shen Shitou’s skull fracturing into bone meal. He was followed by the harvest of the clean star-iron marrow from the boy’s corpse.
“Perish under the old family blade!” Shen Canghai screamed, the words drowned out by the faster-than-sound roar of falling steel. “Let your blood pay for your insolence against our ancient bloodline!”
Ten feet away, Frank stood with his hands in his denim pockets, his yellow hard hat tilted back slightly on his brow.
He didn’t draw a weapon. He didn’t issue an emergency defensive magic charm. He didn’t even drop his thermos.
He simply observed the dropping blade through the QA frame-rate HUD. His voice carried the relaxed, monotonous rhythm of a vocational shop teacher supervising a freshman welding project:
“Remember chapter four of the apprentice manual, Shitou. Pulling strength resists pulling. Crushing strength resists pushing. But high-carbon steel subjected to an unannealed shear angle always fractures along the third slip plane. Keep your jaw tight, align the bite vector, and let the shape do the work.”
In the center of the dropping golden apocalypse, Shen Shitou stood like an ancient mountain anchor.
The young ironworker didn’t raise his twenty-pound forged sledgehammer. He didn’t duck, flinch, or summon a spiritual barrier.
He had spent two years working under Frank’s blueprints, hauling tons of granite, pounding thousands of rivets, and having every bone in his body rebuilt with cold star-iron alloy. To him, the terrifying old family sword was not a sacred relic of royal gods. It was merely an improperly hardened piece of high-carbon bar stock with uneven carbon spreading and micro-fissures along the fuller.
Shen Shitou grounded his steel-toed work boots into the pea gravel, engaged the four hundred and eighty star-steel channels running through his jaw and neck bones. Then it tilted his chin upward at an exact angle of fifteen degrees.
Then, Shen Shitou opened his mouth.
CLAAAAAAAANGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!
The impact was so violent that the sound waves blew all the leftover paper lattice out of the carriage house windows!
The hundred-foot golden sword beam didn’t cleave Shitou in two.
It didn’t even draw a single bead of blood.
The razor-sharp, glowing tip of the 4-Pattern Great Da-Qi Divine Sword plunged directly into Shen Shitou’s open mouth. And hit his upper and lower back teeth with the ear-splitting chime of an anvil being struck by a silver-steel meteor!
The huge, mountain-splitting striking force behind Shen Canghai’s overhead cleave stopped dead.
Not a single tiny fraction of an inch of forward penetration.
The blasting blast wave was instantly passed into Shitou’s skull, down his silver-steel-heavy dark metal neck channels, through his heavy spine, and discharged harmlessly through his work boots deep into the land-wide bedrock!
The pea gravel beneath Shitou’s boots sank three inches. But his jaw remained locked like a high-pressure bank vault!
Patriarch Shen Canghai’s arms jerked wildly as the entire rebound force traveled back up the sword blade, shattering both of his wrists with sickening, crunching snaps!
“What... What’s this?!” Shen Canghai screamed, his eyes bulging until the blood vessels burst across his white of the eye. “The Sky-Cleaving Divine Sword... Stopped by human teeth?!”
Shitou didn’t answer.
His starlight eyes locked onto Shen Canghai’s scared face.
In Frank’s eyes, the Heavenly Bug Tracker screen flashed with instant metalworking tracking data!
Shitou engaged his jaw muscles, delivering eighteen thousand five hundred pounds of pressure of pure, star-iron crushing bite force.
His teeth clamped down on the four-foot blade.
Then, Shitou gave his neck a sharp, brutal, ninety-degree lateral twist!
CRACK! CRACK! CRUNCH! SHATTER!
The old family 4-Pattern Great Da-Qi Divine Sword—an Earth-Tier treasure handed down through twenty-two ages of the Shen Clan, forged by the Founding Emperor’s royal blacksmiths—shattered into six jagged fragments of cold steel!
The four glowing gold-inlaid dragon runes flickered, screamed with a dying wail of scattering spiritual qi. Then it put out forever!
Shitou tilted his head forward.
PTOOEY.
Shitou spat the six jagged steel fragments directly onto Patriarch Shen Canghai’s stitched black-silk boots!
CLINK-CLANK-CLATTER.
The shattered leftovers rolled across the gravel. It smoked faintly, fully stripped of sword intent, reduced to nothing more than dull, twisted scraps of scrap metal.
In Shen Canghai’s shaking hands remained only a four-inch jagged stump attached to the dragon-carved handle.
The courtyard plunged into catatonic, choking silence.
The forty Golden Core elders stood frozen like marble statues in a cemetery. Their hands hung limply at their sides. Their dropped swords lay scattered across the gravel. Their breath was trapped in their throats as if the world’s air had turned to solid glass.
Six hundred years ago, the Founding Emperor of Great Da-Qi had personally presented that sword to the first Patriarch of the Shen Clan to commemorate the conquest of the Western Marches. For six hundred years, that blade had beheaded barbarian warlords, split enemy formation shields, and commanded total obedience across the realm.
And now, an abandoned cripple—a boy they had thrown into an icy ditch to die of black flesh-rot—had bitten the blade in half and spat the pieces like watermelon seeds!
Elder Shen Kuo, still clutching his braced arm, fell backward onto his buttocks, his mouth opening and closing like a choking carp: “A monster... An ancient Divine Asura of the First Epoch... The trash discard has transformed into an iron-eating sky demon!”
Patriarch Shen Canghai looked down at the shattered steel lying across his boots, then looked up at Shitou’s flawless jaw.
Not a single tooth was chipped. Not a single drop of blood stained his gums.
“My sword...” Shen Canghai whimpered, his voice cracking into a high-pitched, childish whine. “The Ancestral Divine Sword of Great Da-Qi... Six hundred years of clan glory... Crushed by teeth...”
Shen Canghai’s mind snapped. The mental foundation of forty years of sword training fractured into dust.
Frank took another leisurely sip of jasmine tea from his thermos, screwed the cap back on, and walked over to the pile of scrap metal.
Frank bent down, picked up one of the broken steel shards. Then he inspected the fracture surface with his thumbnail.
“Good clean shear fracture along the grain boundary,” Frank observed, nodding with mild test. “Good technique, Shitou. The fifteen-degree tilt diverted the squeezing load away from your enamel. Human tooth enamel has a Mohs hardness of five point five. But when backed by star-iron osteocytes and a tiny silver-steel-heavy lung-sac ridge, your nearby crushing yield jumps to over twenty thousand PSI. That’s basic body-leverage load-bearing building.”
Frank picked up a second shard, tapping it against his thumbnail: “If you bite along the shear plane, the blade breaks. If you bite straight-across to the edge, you chip a molar and need an extraction. Clean angles make clean work.”
Princess Jiang Ling’er walked up, peering over Frank’s shoulder through her safety goggles: “Master, look at the alloy cross-section. High nickel content, minimal sulfur embrittlement, properly normalized grain structure. This is genuinely high-grade hard steel.”
“Finally, something from the Shen Clan that isn’t forty percent melted rock waste,” Frank agreed. He dropped the shard into Niu Mang’s empty bucket with a loud CLANG.
Frank turned a stern eye on Shitou: “However, Shitou, I’ve told you before: don’t put uninspected heavy-duty scrap in your mouth. That blade had zinc solder and traces of arsenic in the dragon inlay. If you ingest heavy metal oxides, you’ll spend all tomorrow morning sitting on the outhouse bench with stomach cramps.”
Shitou rubbed the back of his neck, his starlight eyes softening into sheepish embarrassment: “Student was careless, Master. I’ll remember to wipe the steel first next time.”
“There won’t be a next time,” Frank grumbled. “Niu Mang, collect the rest of those shards. That’s at least three pounds of high-nickel alloy. We can melt them down into chisel bits for the stonework shop.”
“Right away, Master!” Niu Mang beamed, scooping up the shattered leftovers of the six-hundred-year-old family sword with his bare hands. “Free tool steel! This will save us twenty spirit stones at the hardware depot!”
Patriarch Shen Canghai watched Niu Mang casually toss the fragments of his family’s sacred heritage into a rusty scrap tub like chicken bones.
The utter, shrugging domesticity of their conversation was a thousand times more humiliating than any martial defeat.
A fountain of dark, maddened blood sprayed from Shen Canghai’s lips!
“Ahhhhhhh! Curse you! CURSE YOU ALL!” Shen Canghai screamed, clawing at his own face until bloody gouges tore across his cheeks. “Kill them! Slay the carpenter! Slay the traitors! Elders of the Shen Clan, swarm them! Tear them apart with your bare hands!”
The forty elders, driven by collective panic and the hypnotic terror of their patriarch’s madness, let out a unified shriek of desperation!
Abandoning their swords, all forty Golden Core masters surged forward at once, their fingers hooked into iron claw strikes. Their spiritual qi erupted in a wild, suicidal wave to overwhelm Classroom 404!
Frank didn’t even look up from his clipboard.
He walked over to a wooden lawn chair set near the porch, sat down, leaned back. Then he crossed his denim-clad legs.
“Shitou,” Frank said, pointing his red pencil toward the charging mob. “They’re tracking red clay all over my newly laid pea gravel again. Tamp it down.”