The universe seemed to pause on the razor-thin cliff edge between existence and total ruin.
In the ancient annals of the Jiuzhou plane, total cooking pot detonations were regarded as the ultimate extinction-level events of the potion-made craft. Eight thousand years ago, during the fall of the Heavenly Sun Sect, an unvented Earth-Grade fire had burst under nine thousand PSI, leveling an entire seventy-peak mountain range and leaving a scorched wasteland of glass that remained uninhabitable to this day. Now, a vessel three times larger, white-hot to ten million Degrees of star-heat and charged with fifteen thousand pounds of deep water pressure, was screaming its final death-rattle in the center of a densely populated royal metropolis.
Every bird within fifty miles plummeted from the sky in shock. The underground water table began to boil through the cobblestone cracks. And the stone pillars of the Nine-Cauldron Tower leaned three inches toward the north under the sheer warped gravity pull.
At fourteen thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine pounds of pressure of internal deep water pressure, the thirty-foot Nine-Dragon Primordial Cauldron was no longer a vessel of solid bronze. It was an over-inflated, semi-clear balloon of white-hot star-fire. It shook at a hum so extreme that the visual spectrum fractured into jagged, prismatic rainbows of spark-charged sky light.
Deep within the underground magma channels beneath the arena floor, the ancient fiery ley-lines of the Jiuzhou continent were pumping thousands of tons of liquid fire into the vessel’s belly with the unstoppable driving force of an underground tsunami.
If the ancient vessel burst spherically, the moving excess pressure would generate a fifty-kiloton sky blast.
The blast wave would expand omnidirectionally at Mach fourteen, vaporizing the Imperial Pill Plaza in two hundred split seconds, leveling the three-hundred-foot Nine-Cauldron Crucible Tower like a sandcastle in a gale, collapsing every timber and stone dwelling across thirty miles of the capital, and exterminating three hundred and forty thousand citizens before the sound could even register in their dying ears.
From the northern palace terrace three miles away, Emperor Yan, the Dowager Empress, and three hundred civil and military ministers turned their scared, ash-streaked faces back toward the plaza.
The sky above the capital had turned into a swirling, world-ending funnel of black ash, burning embers, and violet lightning.
“It’s the end...” an ancient royal censor sobbed, dropping his jade writing tablets into the dust. “The mandate of Great Da-Qi expires today in fire. The sacred capital shall become a crater of molten stone.”
Yet at the epicenter of that swirling vortex, standing on cracked dark rock flat stone slabs that were rapidly melting into slick black glass, Frank didn’t blink.
Through his shade-five dark-tinted welding goggles, the blinding terror of the world was reduced to clean, exact stress vectors.
Frank looked at the chalk ‘X’ he had drawn on the south-facing intake pipe rim coupling. Under fifteen thousand pounds of deep water pressure, the tiny cold shut along the casting seam had swelled into a hairline glowing fault line. It shook on the knife-edge of total atom-deep rupture.
If he struck the pipe rim off-angle by half a degree, the energy would reflect backward into the hull. That triggered the total ball-shaped blast. But if he struck the main shear plane at an exact normal vector of ninety degrees, the material would follow the deepest laws of brittle fracture mechanics.
Frank tightened the tool belt around his denim overalls. He planted his left work boot into the stone. Then he drew back his right leg.
“Defective pressure relief valve,” Frank muttered, his voice calm, flat, and fully empty of fear. “Meet steel-toed boot.”
Frank drove the hardened steel heel of his right boot forward with the smooth, unbending high-pressure speed of a ten-ton heavy-duty drop-forge trip-hammer!
CLINK-KRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK!
The tiny cold-rolled load-bearing steel cap of Frank’s boot struck the chalk ‘X’ with tiny sharp-angled care!
The impact delivered four thousand pounds of nearby moving crushing force directly against the unannealed grain boundary!
That single, deliberate strike was the final straw that broke the camel’s back.
The tiny cold shut along the south pipe rim didn’t shatter randomly into shrapnel.
It unzipped!
SHRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRIP!
With a terrifying, faster-than-sound screech that sounded like the fabric of space itself being torn in two, the south pipe rim weld snapped cleanly open along an exact forty-five-degree upward curved angle!
In Frank’s eyes, the Heavenly Bug Tracker screen flashed with triumphant, golden working metrics!
The total omnidirectional explosion that would have flattened the royal capital didn’t occur.
Instead, the entire fifteen thousand pounds of pressure of overload heat blast was in a heartbeat channeled through the snapped seam!
THOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
A five-hundred-foot-wide column of blinding, blazing bright violet-gold star-fire erupted into the heavens!
It wasn’t smoke. It wasn’t fire.
It was a solid pillar of pure, spark-charged stellar fury—rushing upward at Mach twenty-four point five with a core heat exceeding ten million Degrees of star-heat!
The faster-than-sound star-fire jet punched through the swirling storm clouds above the city like a hot needle through silk. It blasted a clean, ten-mile-wide circular hole through the overcast sky! High above the mortal plane, the blue void of the upper stratosphere was exposed in broad daylight. It was surrounded by a roaring ring of burning golden vapor that could be seen from three neighboring empires! In the northern frontier guard posts eight hundred miles away, barbarian warlords and royal sentries dropped their axe-spears. They looked in superstitious terror at the brilliant violet dawn breaking across the southern horizon in the middle of the morning. In the floating palaces of the Central Continent, ancient sect masters rushed to their watching balconies. He whispered of the descent of a Solar Saint.
Yet down on the arena floor, the level blast excess pressure was exactly zero point zero PSI!
Frank had redirected the moving thrust vector forty-five degrees upward into the sky. Because of that, the surrounding flat stone slabs, the wooden testing tables, and the fleeing spectators in the outer edge tunnels were fully bypassed by the blast wave!
The blast wave roared into the clouds, leaving the ground level fully unscathed!
On the scorched flat stone slabs ten paces away, Grandmaster Ouyang lay flat on his back. He stared up into the sky with glassy, catatonic eyes.
The former Chief Judge looked at the five-hundred-foot column of sky fire piercing the stratosphere.
He looked at the surrounding plaza buildings. It was still standing fully intact, without a single broken tile along the southern row of stone pillars.
A five-hundred-foot pillar of fiery star-fire... Ouyang thought, his mind snapping into tiny fragments of existential awe. He redirected the wrath of the underground Earth Dragon with a single kick of his heel?! What kind of monster understands the weight of the heavens with his shoes?!
From the royal terrace, Emperor Yan dropped his golden saber to the marble floor with a resounding clang.
The Emperor stared at the roaring pillar of violet light, his mouth open, fully unable to utter a sound.
The sixty royal guards fell to their knees. Court ministers began to cry and chant ancient prayers of thanksgiving. And the two hundred thousand fleeing citizens stopped in their tracks along the city avenues. That turned around to gaze in total, religious worship at the golden pillar rising above their capital!
“A Saint of the First Epoch...” Emperor Yan choked out, tears streaming down his weathered cheeks. “He didn’t just survive... He turned the judgment of heaven into a harmless pillar of light!”
Chief Arbiter Pill King Dan Kui fell to his knees beside the Emperor, weeping wildly: “He did it... Master Lu redirected the blast! The capital is saved! The people are saved!”
Forty yards behind the blast pad, shielded behind the pine cart’s iron baffle plates, Classroom 404 stood at rigid attention.
Princess Jiang Ling’er watched the roaring star-fire column through her safety glasses, her yellow hard hat gleaming under the golden light: “Blast bending confirmed! Zero ground excess pressure! Master’s counts were accurate to the fourth decimal place!”
Shen Shitou rested his sledgehammer on his shoulder, his chest broad with unbending pride: “Master’s blueprints never fail. When Master marks a chalk line, the world must obey.”
Niu Mang smiled warmly, taking another slow bite of dried turnip: “The wind is blowing away from the cart. Very clean. The driveway didn’t even get dusty.”
And then—
Grandmaster Ouyang’s eyes widened in utter, paralyzing horror.
The disgraced grandmaster looked toward the base of the five-hundred-foot star-fire column.
Right in the center of that roaring, ten-million-degree faster-than-sound jet of sky fire... Stood Frank.
The young builder was not retreating.
He wasn’t sheltering behind a barrier.
Frank stood directly in the center of the intake breach. His work boots planted was wide, his yellow builder hard hat glowing like a crown of solid starlight amidst the swirling embers.
Frank looked up into the roaring torrent of ten-million-degree star-fire.
He took off his dark welding goggles, tucked them neatly into his denim chest pocket. Then he tilted his head back.
Deep within Frank’s belly, the tightly packed carbon Dantian Cauldron was spinning at seventy-two thousand turns a minute. The internal empty pocket pipe hubs, forged from geodesic six-sided star-iron lattices, generated a sky-high low-pressure vortex that dropped his internal core pressure to total negative zero. To Frank’s HUD, the five-hundred-foot pillar of faster-than-sound star-fire was not a lethal wave of fire. It was thousands of pounds of free, unmetered, high-octane hydrocarbon fuel rushing directly toward an open intake valve.
“Intake speed: Mach twenty-four,” Frank noted with the calm satisfaction of a heavy-duty boiler worker lighting the main pilot light. “Rich fuel mixture, high sulfur content, excellent heat thickness.”
Then, Frank unsealed his Dantian Cauldron to maximum sky-slit, threw his head back toward the heavens. Then he opened his mouth wide to the dropping column of sky flame. Across the mortal plane, the ancient stars themselves seemed to hold their breath in cosmic silence as a lone craftsman prepared to swallow the wrath of the heavens.