The roaring pillar of ten-million-degree fiery star-fire dropped upon the mortal plane with the wrath of an exploding sun.
Throughout the recorded history of the Jiuzhou continent, sky fire of this size had only dropped during the First Epoch, when ancient god-beasts clashed across ancient oceans. The raw sky radiance was so intense that shadow itself ceased to exist within a fifty-mile outer edge. Every stone pillar, every clay roof tile, and every blade of grass in the royal capital was bleached into stark, monochromatic white.
In the southern trade markets five miles away, horses stopped whinnying and collapsed onto their flanks in superstitious total numbness. High in their watching platforms, grand formation masters stared into their burning brass crystals, their beards singeing from the radiant glare. They waited for the world-ending blast wave to wipe Great Da-Qi from the face of the mortal realm.
For miles across the Great Da-Qi Imperial Capital, two hundred thousand spectators and royal guards dropped to their knees in the dusty thoroughfares, covering their faces and whispering their final prayers to the heavens. To any fighter steeped in the classical scriptures of the Jiuzhou plane, mortal flesh subjected to overload star-fire was an equation with only one possible outcome: instant, permanent subatomic vaporization.
In the northern palace gardens, royal ministers fell into the lotus ponds in their wild rush. It wept as they watched the towering column of violet-gold fire pierce the stratosphere.
To the royal court, it was as if an ancient star had fallen from the sky high sky to cleanse the mortal realm of its sins.
Grandmaster Ouyang lay flat in the scorched ash ten paces from the bronze breach. He grabbed his blistered skull, weeping in catatonic madness.
He waited for the sound of Frank’s bones turning to vapor. He waited for the smell of burned up mortal marrow and the ear-splitting blast wave that would blow his own crippled body into ash.
Instead, the sound that tore through the arena was not a dying scream.
It was the terrifying, rhythmic roar of a huge heavy-duty turbo-intake pipe hub spinning up to seventy-two thousand turns a minute!
SHUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!
Frank stood at the base of the five-hundred-foot pillar of violet-gold fire.
His work boots were planted wide in the cracked dark rock. His yellow builder hard hat was tilted back against the updraft. And his mouth was opened wide to the sky.
At his navel, the geodesic six-sided angled slats of his Dantian Cauldron were spinning at faster-than-sound speed. The nearby negative-pressure vortex generated by his tightly packed carbon core didn’t merely invite the dropping star-fire. It exerted a massive, seventy-thousand-pascal gravity empty pocket that seized the entire five-hundred-foot column of sky fire!
The column of flame didn’t splash across the ground.
It didn’t scorch the flat stone slabs.
Like bathwater draining into an unsealed copper pipe, the roaring torrent of ten-million-degree fiery star-fire began to funnel downward into a narrow, swirling spiral!
WHIRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR-GULP!
In Frank’s eyes, the Heavenly Bug Tracker screen flashed with blinding golden fuel-tracking data!
The numbers inside Frank’s HUD climbed with the terrifying speed of a sky-high rocket engine!
Four thousand eight hundred pounds of melted dragon-marrow essence, thousand-year sun lotus extracts, and underground fiery star-fire poured directly into Frank’s throat!
Down the throat-pipe it rushed, bypassing mortal organic tissue via the iron-hard starlight lining of his inner channels, and hammered directly into his Dantian Cauldron!
THOOOOOOOOOOM.
Inside his lower belly, the huge influx was greeted by five hundred mountain-crushing pressure of isotropic high-pressure squeezing!
The amorphous carbon soot—harvested from months of breathing fire backdrafts, forging steel on Ironwood Peak, and refining minerals under Frank’s strict QA protocols—was instantly subjected to the ultimate heat-powered crucible.
Under five hundred thousand bar of pressure and fourteen million Degrees of star-heat of heat flux, the weak van der Waals bonds holding the carbon layers together snapped like brittle dry twigs!
The carbon atoms were wildly driven into a rigid, three-space-folding tetrahedral lattice!
Every single carbon atom bonded to four neighboring atoms with iron-hard covalent fury, crystallizing in real-time into a flawless, optically pure, fifty-seven-faceted cubic diamond core!
Inside Frank’s system diagnostics, the transformation was tracked with clean, clockwork care. The lab-grown diamond pellet—measuring exactly twelve tiny fractions of an inch in width and weighing a massive five hundred carats—exhibited zero internal inclusions, zero crystal strain, and a total refractive index of two point four one seven. It was an isotropic pressure vessel of perfection, capable of withstanding the core pressures of a living star without a single micro-fracture.
Outside, the physical spectacle defied all mortal and immortal understanding alike.
The five-hundred-foot pillar of fire was being swallowed at a sky-high rate!
One second: the upper reaches of the star-fire column collapsed inward with a resounding sonic crack!
Two seconds: the swirling storm clouds above the city were vacuumed into the sky funnel like smoke drawn into a high-capacity heavy-duty exhaust hood!
Three seconds: the purple spark arcs dancing across the arena were drawn into Frank’s chest like iron filings to a giant electromagnet!
Four seconds: the final tendrils of ten-thousand-year dragon fire were pulled through the bronze breach!
Five seconds flat!
CHUFF.
With a soft, final gasp of scattering water vapor, the five-hundred-foot pillar of world-ending sky fire vanished fully.
It was gone.
Not put out by jade magic charms. Not suppressed by formation arrays.
Eaten.
Swallowed down to the last drop of heat energy.
Above the Great Da-Qi Imperial Capital, the sky was no longer choked with dark ash or violet storm clouds. The sky had been scrubbed to a clean, radiant, crystal-clear azure that stretched for a hundred miles in every direction! The morning sunlight poured down onto the arena floor, warm, gentle, and utterly peaceful, lighting up the calm autumn morning as if the cataclysm had been nothing more than a passing dream.
In the center of the vast, quiet plaza stood Frank.
His denim overalls were intact. His yellow hard hat sat comfortably on his brow. His hands were resting in his pockets.
Frank stood motionless for three seconds. That let the internal pressure stabilize within his newly heavy diamond casing.
Then, his broad chest swelled. His throat bobbed once, twice, adjusting the internal pressure differential.
BURRRRRRRRP.
Frank let out a loud, deep, ringing builder belch that echoed across the silent stone arena.
From between his lips floated a tiny, perfect, three-inch ring of semi-clear violet smoke that drifted lazily upward into the morning breeze before dissolving into sparkles of starlight.
Frank reached into his front canvas pocket, pulled out an oily shop rag. Then he wiped his mouth with a thoughtful, satisfied smack of his lips.
“A bit spicy,” Frank muttered deadpan, shaking his head. “Strong notes of sulfur, heavy hints of roasted dragon-bone marrow. A slightly bitter stone aftertaste from that raw lead solder. But overall... Excellent burn smooth speed. Good BTU rating.”
Across the entire Imperial Pill Plaza, and across the three-mile outer edge of the capital, total, ear-splitting silence dropped.
Two hundred thousand spectators stood frozen in the tiered stands, their jaws hanging slack, their eyes wide as saucers, their minds utterly numbed in catatonic, existential shock.
Emperor Yan stood on the royal balcony. His hands shook against the marble rail, fully unable to draw a single breath.
Chief Arbiter Pill King Dan Kui stared down at Frank. He grabbed his yellow hard hat with shaking, white-knuckled fingers. His knees shook so wildly that his joints clicked audibly against the stone.
For eighty years, Dan Kui had studied the sacred scriptures of the Pill Dao. He had learned by heart the Nine Dragon Sutras, the Celestial Crucible Treatises. The life stories of every Grandmaster who had walked the earth since the founding of Great Da-Qi. In all those ancient texts, the main commandment of alchemy was total, humble respect before the fire. One must coax the spiritual ember, placate the fire spirit, and tread lightly upon the threshold of heaven and earth.
Yet here was a young man in canvas work clothes who had treated an ancient, ten-million-degree star blast not with sacred mudras or prayers, but like an unmetered fuel hose filling up an empty kerosene heater!
“It’s not recorded in the scriptures...” Dan Kui whispered, his voice cracking into a broken, breathless sob. “There’s no scroll... No tablet... No sutra that can explain this... He didn’t refine the fire... He digested the cataclysm!”
Beside him, the Dowager Empress Yan took a calm, delicate sip of jasmine tea from Frank’s stainless-steel thermos. A faint, knowing smile touched her weathered lips as she looked down at the lone figure standing in the sunny plaza: “I told you, Yan’er. A craftsman with proper tools never burns his tongue on hot broth.”
He... He ate it...
An ancient thirty-foot cooking pot of overload fiery dragon fire... A world-ending blast capable of erasing an empire... He swallowed it like a bowl of spicy noodles... And burped out a smoke ring?!
Lying in the ash five paces away, Grandmaster Ouyang’s eyes rolled back into his head.
The disgraced leader of the Potion-maker Guild let out a soft, bubbling whimper, curled into the fetal position, and fully lost his mind, giggling like an infant playing with pebbles in the dirt.
Forty yards away behind the pine cart, Princess Jiang Ling’er slowly exhaled, lowering her valve-wrench: “Burning complete. Exhaust cleared.”
Shen Shitou tightened his grip on his sledgehammer, his eyes shining with pure starlight: “Master’s fire is infinite.”
Niu Mang smiled warmly, brushing a speck of ash from his heavy hard dark metal shovel: “Time for Master’s level up. The concrete is cured. Now comes the load-bearing steel.”
And then—
Right in the center of the quiet, sunlit arena, deep within the center of Frank’s lower belly—
A ringing, crystal-clear chime rang out across heaven and earth. It echoed through the quiet streets. It shook through the bones of every living soul in the Great Da-Qi Empire:
DING.