The blasting heat fifty feet from the Nine-Dragon Primordial Cauldron was intense enough to melt iron armor into liquid puddles.
At fourteen thousand two hundred pounds of pressure of internal deep water pressure, the thirty-foot bronze behemoth had entered the overload heat regime. The dark, ancient bronze walls were no longer metal. They had turned fully semi-clear. It glowed with the blinding, blazing bright violet-white radiance of a captive star fallen into the mortal plane.
Through the semi-clear bronze hull, one could witness the terrifying physics of ancient alchemy pushed beyond the threshold of cosmic madness.
Ten thousand years of piled up dragon soot, underground fiery magma. The melted spiritual marrow of ancient heavenly beasts were rotating inside the vessel at faster-than-sound angular velocities. He formed a swirling vortex of multi-million-degree star-fire.
The air around the cooking pot had spark-charged fully. That turned into a howling dome of violet ball lightning that crackled across the scorched flat stone slabs. Gravity itself seemed to distort around the vessel. Loose dark rock cobblestones, broken iron measuring tongs, and charred pine benches were pulled upward off the ground, floating in uneven orbits within the white-hot heat cyclone.
Lying on the melted cobblestones ten paces from the south leg was Grandmaster Ouyang.
The former sovereign power of the Great Da-Qi Potion-maker Guild was pinned flat against the stone by the cooking pot’s huge, heavy local gravity suction. His crimson robes were gone, burned to ash. His skin was blistered and blackened. And his fingernails clawed uselessly at the scorching stone as the gale-force empty pocket dragged him closer to the blazing bright hull.
In his youth, Ouyang had dreamed of becoming the supreme grandmaster of the continent. He had studied ancient scrolls, mastered secret flame mudras, and crushed hundreds of rival apprentices beneath his political maneuvering.
Yet now, staring up at the thirty-foot sun-hot monster he had let loose with red stone glue and blind arrogance, all his ancient formulas and noble titles felt like dry dust blowing across a tomb.
“Save me...” Ouyang weeped, his voice choked with bloody foam and sulfur ash. “Someone... In the name of the founding ancestors... Save me from the fire...”
A pair of heavy, rubber-soled work boots stepped calmly onto the scorched flat stone slabs beside his head.
Ouyang looked up through his swollen, blistered eyelids.
Standing above him, framed against the world-ending vortex of white fire and swirling lightning, was Frank.
The young builder stood with his twenty-four-inch steel pipe wrench resting loosely across his shoulder, his yellow hard hat tilted forward. His shade-five welding goggles reflected the swirling star-fire like twin pools of dark, calm jade.
“S-Senior...” Ouyang sobbed, reaching out a trembling, blackened hand to clutch at the hem of Frank’s canvas overalls. “You came... You came to put out the fire... You came to save my life...”
Frank didn’t look down at Ouyang.
He reached into his pocket, pulled out an eight-ounce brass ball-peen hammer. Then he tapped the south-facing intake pipe rim coupling.
TINK.
The chime was lost in the ear-splitting, faster-than-sound roar of the churning star-fire. But the tactile feedback traveled cleanly up the hickory handle into Frank’s palm.
In Frank’s eyes, the Heavenly Bug Tracker screen flashed with instant load-bearing fault tracking data!
Frank adjusted his dark goggles. That let out a soft, satisfied whistle through his yellow foam earplugs.
“Put out it?” Frank muttered deadpan, finally glancing down at the sobbing Ouyang with mild skilled bemusement. “Why on earth would I put out fourteen thousand eight hundred PSI of overload star-fire? Do you have any idea how much high-grade spirit coal it takes to reach ten million Degrees of star-heat?”
Ouyang blinked in catatonic confusion, the words making no sense to his shattered mind: “What... What did you say?”
“I said your heat building is atrocious, but your fuel thickness is phenomenal,” Frank replied. His voice was calm as an engineer inspecting a town boiler pipe hub. “Eighty-four point six percent nearby stress concentration on the south-facing intake weld where I chalked the ‘X’. The sand mold your ancestors used was twenty tiny fractions of an inch thinner here than on the north face.”
Frank pointed the knurled jaw of his pipe wrench at the glowing chalk mark.
He tapped three distinct points along the chalk line with the brass hammer: TINK... TONK... THUD.
“Hear that hum modulation?” Frank asked Ouyang, speaking with the patient rhythm of a master craftsman instructing a backward apprentice. “High pitch means dense grain. Hollow thud means severe air holes. Along this twenty-inch weld line, your ancestors left a tiny nonstop cold shut. When internal pressure crosses fifteen thousand PSI, the crack doesn’t travel randomly—it follows the path of least pushback right along this seam.”
Forty yards away behind the pine work cart, Princess Jiang Ling’er held her light metal clipboard steady, explaining the physics to Shen Shitou and Niu Mang.
“Watch Master’s foot placement, Senior Brother,” Ling’er whispered. Her safety glasses reflected the blazing bright white glare. “Master isn’t standing directly in front of the seam. He’s standing twenty degrees off-axis. When the weld ruptures, the expanding star-fire will expand into a forty-five-degree curved cone. The blast wave will bypass our station entirely, channeled into the slipstream created by our cart’s baffle plates.”
Shitou rested his hands on his twenty-pound sledgehammer, nodding with deep, respectful understanding: “Master’s shape is total. The laws of physics are his students.”
“Your ancient founders didn’t understand fluid dynamics or shrinkage air holes,” Frank explained, raising his voice slightly over the ear-splitting hum. “When you pour twenty tons of molten bronze into an open upright mold without riser vents, the gasses get trapped near the lower flanges. The metal cools unevenly, creating tiny voids and dendritic hot tears throughout the weld seam.”
Frank looked down at the cowering grandmaster.
“If this vessel ruptures spherically,” Frank continued, “the blast wave will expand omnidirectionally at Mach fourteen, flattening the royal palace, leveling thirty commandery districts, and vaporizing three hundred and forty thousand citizens in their beds.”
Ouyang’s breath hitched in sheer, choking dread: “Then... Then we’re doomed! We’re all doomed to burn!”
“We’re not doomed, Ouyang. We’re just redirecting the exhaust port,” Frank said, stepping over the weeping grandmaster. “If you hit an over-high-pressure tank right on the main shear fault, the seam unzips directionally. Instead of a thirty-foot ball-shaped bomb, the entire blast wave vents along a forty-five-degree upward curved vector.”
Frank looked up into the sky.
“The star-fire jet will shoot straight through the storm clouds into the upper stratosphere,” Frank murmured. “Zero ground damage. Perfect aimed thrust.”
Ouyang stared at Frank’s back, his mind fracturing into cosmic, religious madness: “You... You aren’t trying to seal the vessel... You’re going to rupture it on purpose?!”
“I’m not just rupturing it, Ouyang,” Frank said. His lips curled into a relaxed, confident grin. “I’m having breakfast.”
Frank adjusted his stance, planting his left boot firmly into the cracked dark rock floor.
Deep within Frank’s belly, his tightly packed carbon Dantian Cauldron opened its geodesic silver-steel-alloy intake angled slats to maximum sky-slit. The internal empty pocket suction inside his Dantian began to spin. That created a tiny, high-thickness gravity star-core at his navel that rang at the exact same hum as the churning star-fire inside the bronze cooking pot!
High in the sky, three thousand miles above the mortal plane, ancient scrying mirrors belonging to the Conferred Empires of the Central Continent flickered with blinding purple interference.
Grand Royal Diviners dropped their sky star wheels in total, existential horror:
“Look at the Great Da-Qi map point! A mortal man is standing within five feet of an ancient star-core blast!”
“Is he attempting to contain the wrath of the Earth Dragon with mortal flesh?!”
“No... Look at his stance! He’s not defending! He’s opening his spirit veins to eat the cataclysm!”
Across the fleeing capital, Emperor Yan, the Dowager Empress, and hundreds of court ministers paused on the grand marble terrace of the northern palace gate. Through the dust clouds, they turned back toward the Royal Pill Plaza.
To the naked eye, the entire center of the city was engulfed in a swirling, ten-thousand-foot vortex of blazing bright white fire. It looked as though the sun itself had fallen into the plaza, ready to turn to steam the continent.
Yet right in the center of that white sun stood a single, dark shape in denim overalls, standing upright like an unbending mountain peak.
“Master Lu...” Emperor Yan whispered, his fists clenched, tears welling in his eyes. “May the ancestors protect you.”
Back on the blast pad, the faster-than-sound whistle inside the Nine-Dragon Cauldron reached an unbearable, ear-splitting crescendo!
SKRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR-BOOM!
The semi-clear white-gold bronze hull swelled by four full inches! The micro-fissures along the southern chalk ‘X’ flared with blinding violet light, vomiting plumes of pure, white-hot star-fire!
Inside Frank’s HUD, the digital numbers ticked into the final, end-post second:
[CORE PRESSURE: 14,999.bone-crushing pressure... CRITICAL YIELD POINT REACHED].
[HOOP STRESS: MAXIMUM].
[RUPTURE Starting IN 3... 2... 1...]!
Frank didn’t draw a sword. He didn’t summon an immortal ward.
He didn’t chant ancient scriptures or plead with sky ancestors.
Throughout the history of the Jiuzhou plane, fighters had spent thousand years forging divine swords, weaving silk defensive banners, and carving jade armor to survive the world-ending wrath of heaven and earth. But to Frank, all the treasures of the three realms were merely brittle decorative toys compared to the heavy-duty purity of high-thickness drop-forged tool steel.
Frank looked down at his right boot.
The heavy work boot was crafted from three-layer oil-tanned cowhide, heavy with a tiny cold-rolled load-bearing steel toe cap rated for five thousand pounds of direct crushing impact. Infused with his tightly packed carbon Dantian core, that steel cap was harder than sky diamond, possessing zero heat swelling and total moving holding power.
“A five-thousand-pound safety cap against a tiny cold shut,” Frank murmured softly. “The math checks out.”
He tightened his canvas tool belt, leaned back on his left heel, engaged the full moving mass of his six-ton Dantian core. Then he brought the heavy, steel-capped toe of his right work boot forward with smooth, high-pressure care!