The sound blast wave rippling through the Imperial Pill Plaza had ceased to be mere sound.
Five hundred miles away in the sky towers of neighboring sovereign empires, ancient bronze alarm bells began to toll on their own. High royal diviners and grand formation masters tumbled from their quiet focus cushions. He stared into scrying mirrors that reflected a blinding, purplish-crimson pillar of raw heat energy erupting from the map points of the Great Da-Qi capital. To the land-wide dynasties, it appeared as though an ancient stellar meteor was exploding in the mortal plane.
Within the capital itself, the air pressure plunged as if a hole had been punched through the sky. That created a terrifying air-pressure empty pocket that caused the ears of three hundred thousand residents to pop at the same time.
It was now a physical, crushing sky hammer.
At twelve thousand two hundred pounds of pressure of internal deep water pressure, the thirty-foot Nine-Dragon Primordial Cauldron was shaking at an earth-shattering one hundred and twenty hertz. The cobblestones across the vast arena floor buckled. It waved in nested waves like the surface of a drumhead, throwing massive solid mountain stone ten feet into the air before they shattered into gravel.
Along the outer edge of the plaza, the huge stone foundation pillars supporting the three-hundred-foot Nine-Cauldron Crucible Tower began to groan with the terrifying, deep-hum rumble of a collapsing mountain.
Upright cracks four fingers wide tore through the ancient stonework joints, raining crushed mortar onto the panicked crowds below.
Three miles away in the capital’s commercial districts, fine china shops saw thousands of fragile vases vibrate off their wooden shelves and shatter across the floorboards. In the Royal Star tower, the ancient bronze star-ring spheres spun out of control, their posture needles snapping. The underground fiery ley-lines surged with chaotic, uncontained fury.
“The tower is collapsing!” a royal marshal screamed, abandoning his golden helmet in the dirt. “The land-wide earth dragon has awakened beneath our feet!”
Two hundred thousand people surged toward the city gates like a broken dam. Royal carriages overturned in the narrow avenues. Merchant wagons were splintered into kindling. And high-born sword fighters abandoned their flying swords. That was because the violent, spark-charged magnetic fields streaming from the cooking pot disrupted all spiritual flight arts!
High on the VIP balcony, sixty elite Golden Dragon Guards locked their shields around Emperor Yan and the royal family, attempting to force them down the rear heavy way out stairs.
“Your Royal Majesty! You must evacuate!” the Captain of the Guard roared, his iron visor trembling as he pointed toward the arena stage. “Look at the hull! The bronze has turned white-hot! When it detonates, it will unleash the fury of an ancient meteor strike!”
Emperor Yan shoved the guards aside. His hands gripped the marble balcony rail so hard that his knuckles tore against the stone.
He looked down into the howling, cherry-red storm.
Through the blinding purple fire, flying debris, and swirling clouds of toxic sulfur ash, a lone figure in denim overalls and a bright yellow builder hard hat was walking calmly toward the screaming cooking pot.
The figure had his hands comfortably resting on a twenty-four-inch drop-forged steel pipe wrench held across his shoulder.
“Master Lu!” Emperor Yan screamed, his voice choked with horrified disbelief that rose above the roar of the gale. “What’s he doing?! Why is he walking directly toward the epicenter?!”
Chief Arbiter Pill King Dan Kui clutched his own hard hat, his eyes bulging as tears of deep, religious terror streamed down his cheeks: “He... He’s not fleeing! He’s stepping directly onto the blast pad! Is he sacrificing his mortal body to suppress the cataclysm for the people of Great Da-Qi?!”
Beside them, the Dowager Empress Yan looked down through the swirling smoke.
She saw Princess Jiang Ling’er standing firmly behind the two-wheeled pine cart, her brass valve-wrench raised in calm readiness. Meanwhile, Shen Shitou and Niu Mang stood at the outer edge barrier. That turned back any stray guards who tried to scramble toward the cart.
“Yan’er,” the Dowager Empress said softly, her wrinkled face glowing in the firelight. “Look at the boy with the sledgehammer. Does he look like he’s preparing for a funeral? Master Lu isn’t sacrificing himself. He’s going to work.”
Down on the arena floor, the air heat thirty paces from the cooking pot had reached six hundred degrees.
Frank adjusted his shade-five dark-tinted welding goggles, his heavy rubber-soled work boots crunching steadily over the cracked, smoking dark rock slabs.
In Frank’s eyes, the Heavenly Bug Tracker screen flashed with massive crimson banners and ear-splitting emergency alarm chimes!
“Twelve thousand two hundred PSI,” Frank muttered, checking the knurled collar on his twenty-four-inch pipe wrench. “Rising at three hundred and fifty PSI per second. Internal core heat sitting at six point eight million Degrees of star-heat. The bronze hull is entering the overload semi-clear phase.”
Frank stepped around a pile of melted bronze melted rock waste where a testing table had crumbled into glowing liquid metal.
The radiant heat thickness was so extreme that common iron tools would have softened like butter. But Frank’s denim overalls—woven from dense, double-stitched canvas and infused with his tightly packed carbon core—didn’t even singe. The heat washed over him like a warm hair dryer on a breezy autumn afternoon.
Behind him at the outer edge, a group of desperate royal guards tried to scramble past Classroom 404’s station to reach a backup service gate.
“Out of the way, ditch-digger!” an armored guard captain shouted, his sword drawn in trembling panic. “The ancient cooking pot is exploding! Slay the idiot and run!”
THOOOOOM.
Shen Shitou stepped in front of the captain. The young ironworker didn’t raise his hammer. He simply planted his feet.
The guard captain’s iron shoulder plate slammed into Shitou’s chest. And shattered into twenty jagged pieces of scrap iron!
The captain bounced backward five paces, landing hard on his tailbone, clutching his broken shoulder in stunned agony.
“Stay behind the yellow line,” Shitou said, his deep, starlight voice rolling over the roar of the fire. “Master is currently performing scheduled hot-work upkeep. Civilian personnel are strictly barred from the exclusion zone.”
Niu Mang leaned against his five-foot hard dark metal-iron trench shovel, nodding with a placid smile: “Master said no loitering. You’ll kick up gravel and scratch the paint.”
Princess Jiang Ling’er tightened the strap on her safety glasses, turning her back on the fleeing nobility: “They ran when my spirit veins were frozen, and they run now when the fire burns hot. Master calculated the blast bending angle to three decimal places. This cart is the safest spot in the entire empire.”
Ten paces from the cooking pot, Grandmaster Ouyang lay pinned against the scorched flat stone slabs.
The extreme heat rising heat created by the six-million-degree core had created a nearby sky low-pressure empty pocket! The air was being sucked toward the center of the cooking pot at gale-force speeds. It dragged loose cobblestones, charred banners, and Ouyang’s burning silk clothes straight toward the glowing bronze hull!
Ouyang looked up through the blistering heat, his eyes half-melted, seeing a pair of heavy rubber work boots step into his field of vision.
“S-Senior...” Ouyang croaked, his throat cords shredded by sulfur fumes. He clawed at Frank’s denim pant leg with blistered fingers. “Save... Save me! The earth fire... The demon dragon has burned up my soul! We’re all going to burn!”
Frank paused, looked down at Ouyang through his dark-tinted goggles. Then he tapped the man’s blistered wrist with the flat of his carpenter’s pencil.
“I gave you a check fine ticket twenty minutes ago,” Frank said deadpan. “You told me the people of Great Da-Qi laughed at my cowardice. Why are you lying in the dirt?”
“I was blind! I was a fool!” Ouyang cried, bloody tears evaporating on his scorched cheeks. “Stop the fire! In the name of the Founding Emperor, put out it!”
“You can’t put out an overload nuclear heat runaway with water, Ouyang,” Frank replied. His voice was calm as stone. “That’s basic physics. When pressure exceeds holding, you don’t fight the pressure. You redirect the moving thrust vector.”
Frank looked up at the thirty-foot bronze monster looming directly above them.
At thirteen thousand eight hundred PSI, the blackened bronze hull had turned from cherry-red into a terrifying, semi-clear, blazing bright white-gold!
Through the eight-inch-thick metal walls, one could actually see the swirling, white-hot vortex of fiery star-fire and crushed dragon bone churning inside! The chalk ‘X’ Frank had drawn on the south pipe rim was glowing with intense violet soft glow, marking the exact shear fault where the grain structure had fully dissolved.
The hull began to expand rhythmically, pulsing like the beating heart of an enraged cosmic titan:
THUMP... THUMP... THUMP.
Every pulse discharged a wave of faster-than-sound squeezing that flattened the stone railings within fifty yards!
Inside Frank’s HUD, the digital counter dropped into the final countdown:
[PRESSURE: bone-crushing pressure... T-MINUS 45 SECONDS TO TOTAL HULL FAILURE].
Frank tightened his grip on his heavy-duty steel pipe wrench, rolled his shoulders. Then he took a slow, deep breath of the white-hot air.
Deep within Frank’s lower belly, his tightly packed carbon Dantian Cauldron was humming at maximum ringing exact timing. The geodesic six-sided intake ports unlatched their intake seals, preparing their internal burning chambers for an influx of sky-high size. For three months, Frank had been searching for an energy source dense enough to compress his mortal carbon core into a true crystal-clear diamond matrix. Now, a thirty-foot ten-thousand-year-old bronze pipe bomb was serving up exactly what the blueprint demanded.
“Intake pipe hubs unsealed,” Frank muttered, his lips curling into a faint, deadpan smirk. “Time to turn a heavy-duty safety hazard into a career breakthrough.”
With calm, measured strides, Frank stepped directly onto the center of the blast pad, the heat warping the space around his boots like molten glass. Across the continent, heaven and earth held their collective breath.