The check floor echoed with scratching wolf-hair brushes and clinking jade water droppers. High-born scions sat at their clean marble desks, their brows furrowed in intense concentration. They blended their thousand-gold red stone pastes with sacred dewdrops, chanting mnemonic verses handed down through six ages of royal court astrologers. To these young men, a formation was no mere assembly. It was a holy painting—a poem upon reality’s canvas, requiring flourish and stance.
Frank stood at his damp corner table, peeling heat padding from a strip of copper wire with his thumbnail.
“Look at that technique,” Frank remarked to Shitou. He gestured with his wire strippers toward a young noble two rows ahead. “He spent ten minutes dipping his brush, five minutes waving his sleeves. Now he’s painting a curly flourish on a corner junction. That flourish adds two inches of unnecessary trace length. He’s creating a magnetic-pull loop right next to his input lead. The noise floor on that array is going to be absurd.”
Shitou nodded with solemn gravity, his massive hands resting on the edge of the workbench. “Too much trace creates leech-like inductance, Master,” Shitou recited faithfully.
“Exactly,” Frank said. “If you run an alternating signal through a curly pig’s tail, you don’t get a blessing from the Dragon King. You get signal bounce and a fried charge bank.”
Before Frank cut another wire, a wet commotion erupted in the central aisle.
CLATTER!
A wooden bucket overturned on the dark rock floor, sloshing soapy water and charcoal across the walkway. Standing amid the gray puddle was the blind sweep-boy, Xiao Yu. His thin hands clutched the splintered handle of his hemp broom, trembling wildly. In his haste before the incense burned down, his bare foot had caught on a bronze fire bowl leg. The sloshing water had surged straight toward the dais, splashing over the stitched hem of Lead Examiner Elder Gu’s silk robes and coating his mirror-polished dragon-skin boots in filthy sludge. Even worse, the splash had caught the edge of Elder Gu’s display stone base, soaking an old family 2-Star Talisman Scroll and causing its fine, detailed crimson runes to bleed into a muddy, illegible smear.
The grand hall fell into a breathless hush. Examinees stopped writing. Ye Han froze with his golden brush an inch above his scroll, a smirk spreading across his face.
Elder Gu stared down at his ruined boots, his cheeks trembling with murderous outrage. His eyes slowly rose from the floor to fix upon the scared, shivering boy.
“Blind dog,” Elder Gu whispered. His voice shook with venom that made the nearby water puddles ripple. “Disgraced wretch of the Heavenly Talisman Pavilion... You dare soil my royal robes and desecrate an old family scroll with your sewer filth?!”
“Forgive me, Elder!” Xiao Yu cried, throwing himself onto his knees in the muddy water, bowing his head against the stone. “This student was careless! I didn’t see the fire bowl leg! I’ll scrub the floor with my own hair! Please... Have mercy!”
“Mercy?” Elder Gu snarled. He stepped off the dais, reaching for the weapon rack. He lifted a four-foot punishment staff forged from heavy black iron, tipped with cruel three-sided spurs designed to shatter bone and rupture spirit vein channels. “Ten years ago, your clan cast you into the snow because your poisoned eyes couldn’t tell red stone from water. Our guild let you sweep our refuse. And you repay us by smudging sacred calligraphy?!”
Elder Gu channeled his early-stage Golden Core training into the iron staff. Dark crimson spiritual qi coiled around the three-sided spurs. It hissed like an enraged viper as the staff dropped toward Xiao Yu’s exposed kneecaps. “Since your eyes are already dead, you have no need for legs! Crawl through the gutter where you belong!”
Examinees watched with cold amusement, nodding at the brutal punishment. Xiao Yu squeezed his eyes shut, bracing for the bone-shattering strike.
CLINK.
The sound was not the wet crunch of shattering bone. It was the sharp, solid chime of two forged tools colliding in mid-air. Elder Gu’s heavy iron staff stopped dead, suspended three inches above Xiao Yu’s shoulder blades. The huge spiritual force coursing through the weapon suddenly hit an unmoving barrier, shuddering back up the shaft and sending painful blast waves through Elder Gu’s wrists.
Elder Gu gasped, stumbling back half a step. Standing over the kneeling boy was Frank.
Frank held a twelve-inch forged steel flat pry-bar in his right hand. The notched claw of the pry-bar hooked around the iron staff, catching the strike at the center of percussion and neutralizing its driving force. Frank chewed on a dry toothpick, looking bored.
“Who swings a pry-staff with locked elbows?” Frank asked, his voice echoing flatly across the silent hall. “You’re throwing your entire lower-back spine into a downward arc with no follow-through. If you hit a hard surface like that, the rebound shock will pop your shoulder cuff right out of the socket. Terribly unergonomic.”
Elder Gu’s face turned from purple to black. “Insolent vagrant! You dare interfere with the punishment execution of the Thousand-Rune Guild?!”
“I’m not interfering with discipline,” Frank said, flicking the staff aside. “I’m inspecting the site. And you’re blaming the wrong part for a systems failure.”
Frank looked down at the shivering boy on the floor. A neon-amber test window flared in Frank’s HUD with rapid data streams.
Frank read the system readout, his eyebrows rising slightly beneath the brim of his canvas cap. “Full spectrum from fractional Hertz up to four hundred and fifty gigahertz,” Frank muttered under his breath. “The kid isn’t blind. His sight display cable is unplugged, but his internal spectrum analyzer is running at lab grade.”
Frank reached down, grabbed Xiao Yu by the collar of his rough hemp tunic. Then he hauled the boy to his feet. “Get up off the wet grout. You’re soaking your trousers, and wet linen has terrible insulating heat padding.”
Xiao Yu stood trembling, his sightless face turned upward toward Frank’s voice. “Senior...” Xiao Yu stammered, tears soaking his black blindfold. “I... I ruined the sacred scroll. I can’t see the ink... I can never learn the Dao of Formations...”
“Who told you formations are about ink?” Frank asked, shaking his head.
Elder Gu sneered, regaining his footing. “Every grandmaster since the First Epoch knows that formations are written with red stone and sacred brushes! Without eyes to see the sacred shape of the brushstroke, one is nothing more than a blind cripple!”
Frank looked at Elder Gu with the tired pity of a senior engineer explaining basic electricity to an angry toddler. “Why force an RF analyzer to paint watercolor cards? Calligraphy is for menus. Formations aren’t paintings. They’re signal lines, ringing tank circuits, and sound waves.”
He reached into his leather tool roll. He pulled out a matched pair of heavy, four-inch forged steel tuning forks tuned to a deep hum. Frank tossed them lightly through the air. “Catch.”
Xiao Yu flinched at the sound of the metal cutting through the air. He didn’t see the tools, but his ears tracked the disturbed air with care. His thin hands darted out, catching both steel forks cleanly in his palms. The metal was cool, smooth, and possessed an exquisite, balanced heft.
“What are these?” Xiao Yu whispered, his fingertips tracing the twin tines of the steel forks.
“Sound tracking data probes,” Frank said. “Strike one against the floor.”
Xiao Yu paused, then gently tapped the base of the left tuning fork against the dark rock flat stone slab.
PING.
A pure, ringing 440-Hertz tone blossomed outward through the grand hall. To the high-born examinees and Elder Gu, it was merely an annoying metal chime. But to Xiao Yu, the world exploded into clarity.
The sound shaking didn’t merely travel through the air. It traveled through the dense crystal-clear lattice of the dark rock floor. It reflected off the lodestone pillars. It bounced off the ceiling vault. Then it shook through the hidden spiritual channels buried beneath the stonework. In the darkness of Xiao Yu’s mind, the invisible became visible. He saw the grand hall rendered not in colors, but in shimmering, three-space-folding sound topology. He felt the exact thickness of every stone wall, the subtle stress fractures in the eastern archway. The precise speed of the spiritual current pulsing through the guild’s underground leylines.
Even more astonishingly, when the soundwave washed over Frank’s copper coil on the back table, the tone rang back with a total, zero-drag harmony that brought a sob to the boy’s throat.
Xiao Yu fell to his knees again—not in fear, but in overwhelming, thrilled respect. He clutched the two steel forks to his chest. His forehead pressed gently against the stone as tears poured beneath his blindfold.
“Master...” Xiao Yu cried, his voice shaking with awe. “I see it... The hall has a spine! The leylines have a song! For ten years, they told me I was broken because the ink was black... But you gave me the Eyes of Heaven!”
Frank rubbed his jaw, visibly uncomfortable with the emotional display. “Stop crying on the floor, kid. You’re getting snot on my good tuning forks. Those are hardened tool steel. They rust if you don’t oil them.”
Frank gestured toward his corner workstation. “Get behind the bench. You’re our new sound QA tester. Shitou, hand him a roll of spark tape and show him how to hold the ground lead.”
“Yes, Master,” Shitou grunted, gently guiding the weeping boy behind Frank’s table.
Elder Gu’s hands shook with rage so intense his knuckles turned ivory white. “Fools! Madmen! You take a blind beggar as an apprentice and insult the sacred red stone of our ancestors?!” He pointed his iron staff at the large bronze incense burner on the dais. The first incense stick was already half-burned, a glowing red ember dropping gray ash onto the brass rim. “Two incense sticks remain! If you don’t produce an approved 1-Star Spirit Gathering Array before the final ash falls, I’ll summon the Garrison Judges to execute every last one of you for heresy against the Dao!”
Frank picked up a six-inch rusty iron nail from his desk and held it up to the light. “Two incense sticks? That’s about twenty minutes. Plenty of time to wind a hundred-turn power-coil and take a tea break.”
Across the hall, Ye Han dipped his brush into his snake red stone with a smug, mocking grin, while in the corner, Xiao Yu gripped his steel forks, his blind face shining with quiet, rock-steady faith.