The carriage house courtyard looked like an open slaughterhouse of wounded high-born pride.
Forty Golden Core elders of the Divine Sword Shen Clan charged forward in a frenzied, screaming wave. Having seen their old family Earth-Tier sword bitten into scrap metal, their cultivated minds had collapsed into pure, primitive animal terror. Their fingers were hooked into gouging claw strikes. Their stitched boots tore up the garden beds. And their throat-rending war cries shook the evening mist.
“Tear the demon to pieces!” an elder shrieked, his silver robes fluttering as his palms flared with jagged blue lightning. “Drown him in numbers! Flay his flesh with bare hands!”
Frank sat comfortably in a wooden lawn chair near the porch. He took another sip of lukewarm jasmine tea from his stainless steel thermos.
Beside him stood Princess Jiang Ling’er in her yellow hard hat and safety goggles. She held her light metal clipboard. Meanwhile, Niu Mang leaned placidly on his five-foot hard dark metal-iron trench shovel. She watched the charging mob with mild curiosity.
“Master,” Ling’er observed, tapping her pencil against her notepad. “Their approach speed is uneven. They have zero outer edge holding power, and three of their elders are stepping directly through the drainage swale we dug this morning.”
“Worse than that, Ling’er,” Frank sighed, shaking his head with deep skilled fatigue. “No regard for surface grading. They’re tracking high-plasticity red clay from the garden beds straight onto my freshly leveled pea-gravel driveway. It’ll take three hours with a pressure washer to get that silt out of the drainage voids.”
Frank leaned back in his lawn chair, resting his clipboard across his denim knees.
“Shitou,” Frank called out, pointing his red carpenter’s pencil toward the charging swarm. “Tamp it down. Maximum Judge thickness.”
“Understood, Master!” Shen Shitou rumbled.
The young ironworker stood in the center of the driveway, his starlight channels flaring with cold, rhythmic power. He reversed his grip on his twenty-pound forged sledgehammer. It slid his calloused right hand toward the base of the hickory handle.
He didn’t swing the hammer at the charging elders.
He didn’t strike their skulls, their shoulders, or their outstretched lightning claws.
Instead, Shen Shitou raised the twenty-pound steel hammerhead six feet above his shoulder, shifted his balance point forward. Then he brought the flat, hardened striking face downward directly against the loose pea gravel between his boots!
WHAM!
The ground didn’t merely shake. It let out a sharp, faster-than-sound sonic crack that echoed off the surrounding stone walls like an artillery shell!
WHAM!
A second strike followed in less than three hundred split seconds!
WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!
Shen Shitou’s arms blurred into a rhythmic, clockwork piston cycle!
Forty-two thousand blasts of heat of focused striking force discharged into the ground with every single stroke, pulsing through the sub-grade at a precise, ringing hum of exactly sixty hertz!
In Frank’s eyes, the Heavenly Bug Tracker screen flashed with real-time geotechnical tracking data!
Frank pointed at the shaking ground, lecturing Ling’er and Niu Mang in a calm, pedantic tone: “Take note, crew. When angular crushed gravel is subjected to nonstop sixty-hertz upright cyclic shearing, the effective stress between specks drops to zero. Pore fluid pressure rises to equal the overburden pressure. It’s the exact same principle we use when shaking wet concrete into formwork to eliminate honeycombing.”
The forty charging elders suddenly felt the solid earth vanish from beneath their boots!
Under the high-hum sixty-hertz shaking, the pore water pressure between the gravel stones and underground silt spiked to maximum threshold. The loose gravel and subsoil instantly underwent complete geotechnical soil liquefaction!
The solid driveway transformed into a swirling, zero-drag basin of liquid stone!
GLUB-GLUB-SINK!
“What... What’s happening?!” an elder screamed as his boots sank into the cobblestones as if stepping into boiling porridge!
“The earth has turned to water!” another elder wailed, flailing his arms in terror as his silk robes were sucked beneath the swirling surface.
All forty Golden Core masters—running at full forward sprint—lost one hundred percent of their traction and driving force!
Their legs plunged into the fluidized gravel: ankles first, then shins, then knees, and finally sinking straight down to their hips in the churning stone slurry!
Several elders tried to summon their flying swords to take flight. But the nearby sound shear field shredded their spiritual linkages before the blades could lift from the ground!
Patriarch Shen Canghai, rushing forward with his broken sword handle raised high, plunged deepest of all. Sinking thirty-six inches into the soupy aggregate until the gravel reached his armpits!
And then—
Shen Shitou delivered one final, thunderous blow against the center keystone!
THOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
The shaking stopped dead.
The excess pore water pressure faded away into the drainage trenches in a fraction of a split second.
The fluidized pea gravel and crushed granite in a heartbeat snapped back into solid state, linked at one hundred percent maximum Judge thickness!
KER-CHUNK.
The ground became harder than diamond-heavy concrete!
The forty Golden Core elders of the Divine Sword Shen Clan were trapped waist-deep in the driveway, cemented into the stone floor like an ugly decorative garden border of living fence posts!
“Move! Why can’t I move?!” an elder shrieked, wildly clawing at the compacted pebbles with his fingernails until his fingertips bled.
The gravel didn’t budge a tiny fraction of an inch.
The angular aggregate was so tightly interlocked under Frank’s compaction settings that even their Golden Core spiritual qi was fully stifled by the huge crushing friction surrounding their lower dantians! Every time they tried to circulate qi, the crushing pressure of the compacted stones pinched their spirit veins shut like vice grips.
Shen Canghai thrashed in the stone, his broken wrists pinned against his ribs, his black dragon plate mail locked in the gravel like a sunken boulder.
“Demon... You’re a demonic sorcerer!” Shen Canghai coughed, spitting gravel dust and bloody foam from his lips. “Release us! The High-born Court will have you flayed alive for touching clan elders!”
The heavy, unrushed crunch of steel-toed work boots approached through the settling dust.
Shen Shitou walked over to where the clan patriarch was stuck in the driveway. The young ironworker stood over the man who had ordered him thrown into the melted rock waste pit, his shadow stretching across the gravel in the dying twilight.
Shitou rested the heavy, cold, twenty-pound steel head of his sledgehammer gently against the center of Patriarch Shen Canghai’s forehead.
CLINK.
The sheer, chilling weight of twenty pounds of unbending forged steel resting on his skull caused Shen Canghai’s eyes to widen in primal, animal terror.
The cold steel smelled of coal smoke, machine grease, and honest labor.
“Shen Canghai,” Shitou said, his voice flat, steady, and heavier than the mountain itself. “You spoke of filial debts. You spoke of clan ownership.”
Shitou reached into the pocket of his indigo work trousers, pulled out a folded scroll of stiff royal parchment. Then he dropped it into the gravel right in front of Shen Canghai’s nose.
The scroll was an official Certificate of Bloodline Severance. He was stamped with the red wax seal of the Royal Trade Trial.
“Sign it,” Shitou said.
Shen Canghai stared at the parchment, his jaw trembling wildly: “A bloodline severance... You want me to sever our old family connection?! Never! You’re of the Shen Clan! Your marrow belongs to—”
Shitou didn’t shout. He simply applied three ounces of downward pressure on the sledgehammer handle.
CREAK.
The bone of Shen Canghai’s forehead groaned under the nearby crushing load. A tiny crack appeared in the patriarch’s skull armor. A thin trickle of crimson blood began to leak down between his eyebrows.
“Three ounces more, Patriarch,” Shitou murmured softly. “And your skull fractures along the frontal stitch line. Just like the plows your foundry melted down.”
Shen Canghai looked into Shitou’s starlight eyes.
There was no hatred in the boy’s gaze. There was no petty desire for revenge.
There was only the cold, unbending care of an ironworker preparing to discard a ruined, non-compliant piece of scrap metal.
Shen Canghai’s spirit broke fully into dust.
“I’ll sign! I’ll sign! Lift the hammer!” Shen Canghai sobbed, tears and snot mixing with the gravel dust on his bruised face.
The clan patriarch raised his trembling, broken right index finger, bit down on his own flesh until blood welled. Then he stamped his bloody thumbprint onto the bottom of the severance scroll!
“I, Shen Canghai, Patriarch of the Divine Sword Clan...” Shen Canghai cried, his voice choking with total humiliation, “hereby renounce all filial, old family, and bloodline claims over Shen Shitou forever! He’s no longer of our blood! He’s dead to our lineage!”
Shitou lifted the sledgehammer from Shen Canghai’s forehead, bent down. Then he picked up the bloody parchment.
He blew the dust from the seal, folded the document neatly. Then he walked over to Frank’s lawn chair.
Shitou bowed forty-five degrees, holding the scroll out with both hands:
“Work site cleared, Master. The bloodline debt is canceled in full.”
Frank took the scroll, inspected the bloody thumbprint, and nodded with mild satisfaction.
“Good,” Frank said, tucking the paper into his clipboard. “Proper legal documentation prevents future boundary disputes. Always get the customer’s signed name before packing the tools.”
Frank took a final sip of jasmine tea. He closed his thermos, and stood up from the wooden lawn chair.
He looked over the driveway at the forty elders stuck waist-deep in the compacted gravel, groaning and weeping in the twilight.
Frank pointed his red pencil toward the front porch.
“Shitou. Niu Mang.”
“Here, Master!”
“Bring the stiff broom and the wheelbarrow,” Frank said, turning toward the kitchen. “Sweep the loose stones off the front porch, and make sure nobody touches the wok. Dinner is at six-thirty, and we have court in the morning.”
Frank paused at the threshold, glancing back over his shoulder at the forty whimpering elders stuck in the driveway.
“And leave them in the gravel overnight,” Frank added deadpan. “It helps stabilize the sub-grade while the aggregate cures. If anyone tries to dig them out before sunrise, charge them a twenty-stone parking rule-break.”