Frank brushed aside a layer of smoking white ash with the cuff of his heavy cowhide glove.
Beneath the blistered melted rock waste of the snapped intake pipe hub, nested inside the depression where the south bronze pipe rim had buckled, rested thirty semi-clear, opalescent orbs.
Each sphere was exactly thirty-a tiny fraction of an inch in width.
They didn’t emit violent spiritual heat. Instead, they radiated a calm, steady violet-gold eerie glow that hovered three inches above the cooling bronze plates like gentle morning mist over a calm lake.
Frank picked one up between his thumb and forefinger.
The outside surface was glassy, cool to the touch, and fully free of casting flash, pitting, or surface air holes.
Under his Level 35 test HUD, the tiny cross-section resolved into a perfectly ordered crystal-clear lattice. When the fifteen-thousand-PSI aimed rupture occurred, the four-million-degree fiery star-fire had collided with the melted healing extracts at the exact focal point of the shear guideline.
The clockwork blast wave had functioned as a nonstop-flow sound homogenizer.
Every impurity, heavy metal trace, and toxic healing fine dust had been atomized and expelled vertically out the top vent. The leftover bio-spiritual fats had underwent instant isotropic squeezing, freezing into thirty solid crystal-clear spheres of total chemical purity.
Frank’s eyes blinked with golden test text.
“Decent surface finish,” Frank murmured, rolling the sphere across his leather palm. “Zero air voids. Sphericity within one hair-fraction. Like care chrome ball bearings fresh out of a Swiss centerless grinder.”
He gave the pill a light squeeze.
The pulling strength was extraordinary. The crystal-clear skin bent by a fraction of a percent before rebounding with clean stretch.
“Purity approved at one hundred percent,” Frank noted, nodding. “No bitter healing dregs. No volatile organic binders. They ran the cracking cycle without leaving a single milligram of toxic residue.”
High above on the royal balcony, the silence was choking.
Two hundred thousand people held their breath as Chief Arbiter Pill King Dan Kui leaned over the marble stone railing. His hands gripped his brass check telescope until the tubing bent:
“Thirty... Thirty orbs...” Dan Kui whispered, his voice cracking into a ragged wheeze. “The color is ghostly mother-of-pearl... The Dragon-Qi halo is nine nested layers... That’s the legendary Sixth-Grade Sovereign Pill: the Heaven-Ascending Dragon Pill!”
The three hundred grandmasters of the Potion-maker Guild froze where they knelt in the dirt.
A Grade-6 Sovereign Pill!
In the four-thousand-year history of the Great Da-Qi Empire, only two Grade-6 pills had ever been blended. Both had needed three decades of nonstop smelting by eighteen Nascent Soul elders, destroyed three mountain ranges. Then he carried an eighty-percent melted rock waste ratio.
Even then, the healing purity had barely scraped eighty-four percent!
And now, lying in a pile of cooling heavy-duty scrap, thirty Grade-6 Sovereign Pills had been produced in a five-second explosion. With one hundred percent chemical purity!
A single Grade-6 Flawless Dragon Pill possessed enough life-essence to extend a dying Nascent Soul patriarch’s lifespan by eight hundred years. It could cleanse the spiritual roots of an entire royal clan or purchase a coastal trade province!
Thirty of them represented the national treasury of three royal dynasties!
“Master Lu...” Emperor Yan gasped from his knees, his hands trembling. “Thirty pills of the Sovereign Dragon... An empire’s fortune forged from the heavens...”
Frank didn’t hear him. Or if he did, he didn’t care.
Frank turned his head toward the Ironwood Peak team staging area fifty paces away.
“Shitou!” Frank barked, his voice cutting through the dead quiet. “Bring the torque wrench and step over here.”
Shen Shitou right away straightened his stance. He grabbed his heavy leather tool bag, squared his yellow hard hat. Then he marched across the cracked dark rock with the steady pace of a heavy-duty bulldozer.
“Reporting, Master!” Shitou said, snapping his boots together at the edge of the crater. “Torque wrench standing by. Foundation check complete. What’s your command?”
Frank weighed the Grade-6 Heaven-Ascending Dragon Pill in his hand.
“You’ve been complaining about rubbing drag in your shoulder channels after we laid the iron tracks on the south slope,” Frank said. “Your silver-steel spirit vein plating is binding under high torque. You need a high-thickness lubricant to smooth out the fluid dynamics.”
Frank flicked his wrist.
FLICK.
The priceless Grade-6 Flawless Heaven-Ascending Dragon Pill sailed through the air in a lazy arc, tumbling end over end like a roasted peanut tossed across a tavern table.
Every grandmaster on the royal balcony felt their soul leave their physical body.
“NOOOOOOOOO!” Dan Kui screamed in total terror, lunging forward with outstretched arms. “THE SOVEREIGN DRAGON! THE SACRED EMBRYO OF THE SAGES! DO NOT DROP IT ON THE DIRT!”
Three royal elders clutched their chests and fainted onto the marble floor.
Shen Shitou didn’t blink.
He raised his heavy cowhide work glove, snapped his fingers closed. Then he snatched the sky orb cleanly out of the air:
CLACK.
Shitou brought the pill to his nose, gave it a pragmatic sniff, and looked at Frank: “Is this the solvent flush, Master?”
“Internal high-pressure lubricant,” Frank corrected. “Take it with a deep breath and let it clear the lines.”
“Understood, Master.”
Without pause, Shen Shitou tossed the multi-million-stone Grade-6 Sovereign Pill into his mouth, clamped his jaws shut. Then it bit down:
CRUNCH! CRUNCH! CRUNCH!
The sound of the pill shattering sounded like someone chewing on a handful of clean pea gravel.
Shitou swallowed hard:
GULP.
Two hundred thousand people stopped breathing.
Grandmaster Ouyang, still sitting in his blackened underwear in the melted rock waste heap, stopped babbling for a second, stared at Shen Shitou with wide, bloodshot eyes. Then it slowly began to wet himself.
Inside Shen Shitou’s chest, the reaction was instant.
The pure dragon marrow bio-fats melted the moment they contacted his internal heat. The fluid rushed through Shitou’s newly grafted silver-steel spirit vein channels, coating the inner metal walls with a zero-drag diamond-slick film!
VMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!
A blinding silver radiance surged through Shitou’s muscular frame. His skin took on the burnished sheen of cold-forged stainless steel. The heavy veins along his forearms pulsed with liquid silver light. And the clockwork whining in his left shoulder vanished fully.
His physical strength doubled. His internal Qi throughput increased by three hundred percent without a single spike in channel heat!
Shitou wiped his mouth with his leather sleeve and rolled his broad shoulders with a crisp motion:
CLICK-CLACK.
“Zero binding, Master,” Shitou reported with stone-faced satisfaction. “Thickness in the main lines improved by forty percent. Left shoulder rotator cuff has zero play. Ready for heavy load-bearing lifting.”
“Good,” Frank nodded. “Remind me to log that in the equipment upkeep schedule tonight.”
High on the VIP balcony, Dan Kui’s mind finally snapped under the weight of cosmic absurdity.
The Chief Judge tore off his violet silk outer robe and ritual sash.
He vaulted over the marble stone railing, tumbled thirty feet down into the arena dirt, scrambled to his feet. Then he sprinted across the smoking dark rock toward Frank!
The royal guards reached for their axe-spears, but Emperor Yan screamed: “Hold! Let the Pill King pass! Don’t disturb the Sage!”
Dan Kui reached the outer edge of the blast crater.
Ten paces away from Frank’s work boots, the greatest living potion-maker of the Eastern Continent dropped to his knees, threw his hands forward. Then he slid across the jagged bronze melted rock waste on his belly!
Tears and soot streaked across Dan Kui’s venerable face as he pressed his forehead firmly against the steel toe of Frank’s left work boot:
“Master Lu! Divine Teacher! Living Patriarch of Heaven!” Dan Kui wailed, clutching the thick leather of Frank’s boot with trembling hands. “This blind old dog has wasted six hundred years studying weeds and copper kettles! I have refined garbage while calling myself a Pill King!”
Frank looked down at the weeping old man clutching his footwear.
Frank frowned slightly, shifting his foot back half an inch: “Watch the laces. Those are genuine rawhide.”
Dan Kui looked up, his bloodshot eyes brimming with desperate worship:
“Master! Take me as your student! Take me as your third-tier site apprentice! I’ll renounce the Potion-maker Guild! I’ll surrender my ninety-nine cooking pots! I only ask to carry your tool bucket! Let me hold your chalk line! Let me sweep the floor of your workshop!”
Behind Dan Kui, the leftover potion-maker elders hobbled forward. They fell onto their knees in a massive semicircle of supplication.
“Master Lu! Have mercy on us blind fools!”
“Accept us as site laborers!”
Frank scratched the back of his neck beneath the brim of his hard hat. He looked at the begging on their knees crowd of grandmasters.
He let out a tired, pragmatic sigh.
“Can you sweep concrete without kicking up dust?” Frank asked deadpan.
Dan Kui blinked, caught fully off-guard: “Sweep... Sweep concrete?”
“Yes,” Frank said, his tone dry as kiln-dried pine. “Dry sweeping concrete floors kicks up tiny quartz dust particulates into the air. It’s a severe occupational breathing hazard. If you wave a broom around like an amateur, everyone breathes in concrete dust. You need to use sweeping compound or a fine water mist to knock down airborne specks. Can you do that?”
Dan Kui’s eyes widened with deep, sky awe.
Glass dust particulates! Airborne breathing hazards!
The Master’s teachings encompass even the tiny spirits of dust! He cares for the longevity of the soul through fine dust crushing weight!
“I can do it!” Dan Kui shouted, bowing deeply toward the stone. “I swear on my Dao heart! I’ll use my Seventh-Rank True Fire to burn up every tiny fine dust in mid-air before it touches the air! I can sweep for ten thousand years without kicking up a single speck of dust!”
Frank stared at him for three seconds.
“We’ll see,” Frank said neutrally. “First of all, put your hard hat on straight. Second, get out of this blast crater. You’re not wearing steel-toed boots, and there are sharp bronze shards everywhere. Walking on an active demolition site in cloth slippers is a Level 1 CIE-404 fine ticket.”
Dan Kui scrambled backward on his hands and knees, with deep awe adjusting his yellow hard hat: “Yes, Master! Understood, Master! Safety first!”
Frank turned back to the cooling depression in the cooking pot belly.
He reached into his leather tool belt and unclipped a heavy, raw, unwhitened canvas drawstring pouch—the kind normally used for spare pipe couplings and hex nuts.
He bent down, scooped up the leftover twenty-nine Grade-6 Flawless Heaven-Ascending Dragon Pills. Then he dumped them unceremoniously into the canvas bag:
CLATTER-CLATTER.
The priceless sky treasures rattled against each other inside the canvas pouch like a handful of cheap glass marbles.
Frank pulled the rough hemp drawstring tight, tied it off with a standard square knot. Then he clipped the canvas sack back onto his tool belt, right beside his eight-inch adjustable wrench.
Two hundred thousand spectators watched the sack of world-shattering divine pills bounce casually against Frank’s denim hip with every step he took.
“Shitou, pack up the survey gear,” Frank said, turning toward the royal grandstand. “It’s past noon, and the Emperor still owes us the winner’s purse. Let’s go collect the cash so we can place the lumber order before the supply yards close.”