The second incense stick was burning down to its bronze base. It cast thin coils of fragrant gray smoke toward the vaulted lodestone ceiling. At the center of the grand testing floor, Ye Han was concluding his masterpiece.
With a final sweep of his golden badger-hair brush, the young master completed the final stroke of the “Seven Star Flowing Ink Method.” He exhaled a long breath of refined spiritual mist, his silk sleeves fluttering as if moved by a divine breeze. Upon his clean white silk parchment lay an array composed of four thousand tiny red stone characters. The crimson runes formed nested linked rings resembling the sky star-patterns of the northern sky. A gentle, shimmering crimson light hovered half an inch above the parchment, emitting a delicate fragrance of lotus blossoms and refined adder venom.
“Exquisite!” two junior exam guards gasped, clapping their hands in delight. “Truly worthy of the Ye Clan’s old family heritage! The ink spreading is as smooth as morning mist over the Eastern Sea!”
Ye Han straightened his back, dabbing a speck of sweat from his forehead with his silk handkerchief. He glanced back at Frank’s wobbly table with open, triumphant disdain. “Judge,” Ye Han commanded smoothly. “Bring the Testing Orb. Let’s see the deep ring of true art.”
A judge scurried forward carrying a brass stone stand mounted with a fist-sized orb of polished quartz. The judge carefully placed the orb atop Ye Han’s array stone base and touched the activation rune. The quartz sphere began to glow. A soft, emerald soft glow filled the orb, pulsing at a steady, steady beat. Small silver numerals materialized within the crystal: 120 SFU.
“One hundred and twenty Spiritual Flow Units!” the judge announced in an awed shout. “A superior 1-Star gathering array! The highest score in the Hegemonic Frontier for the last five years!”
A chorus of envious murmurs swept through the high-born testers. Ye Han smirked, crossing his arms and turning his sneer toward Frank. “One hundred and twenty units,” Ye Han mocked. “Four decades of clan refinement. Now, let’s witness what the unwashed ditch-digger has produced with his rusty nails and scrap metal.”
Elder Gu leaned over the front of the dais. His narrow eyes shone with vindictive excitement. “Three minutes remain on the second incense stick!” Elder Gu barked, glaring at Frank’s table. “If your array doesn’t register at least thirty units on the Testing Orb, you’ll be dragged to the courtyard in chains!”
Frank didn’t look up from his desk. He had spent the last fifteen minutes sitting on his stool, leaning forward with his elbows on the marble tabletop, rolling lengths of scrap copper wire between his calloused fingers. Behind him, Xiao Yu stood rigidly, clutching his two steel tuning forks like holy relics. Shen Shitou stood beside the boy. He held a roll of black vinyl spark tape with the solemn respect of a priest presenting sacred incense.
“Master,” Ling’er whispered, leaning over Frank’s shoulder. “The noble examinee’s array seems very popular with the judges. The energy pattern is quite even.”
Frank let out a short, nasal snort. “Even? It’s a disaster. It’s what happens when you let an inside decorator design a three-phase power yard.” He pointed his wire strippers across the room toward Ye Han’s glowing silk scroll. “Look at the trace shape. Fluid ink dries with inconsistent cross-sectional thickness. In the wide loops, the trace is twenty mils thick. At the corners, where his brush paused, it pinches down to two mils. That creates nearby pushback spikes.”
Xiao Yu’s ears twitched beneath his blindfold. “Pushback spikes create heat, Master?”
“Exactly,” Frank replied, glancing at the boy with mild test. “High sheet pushback. Ten thousand ohms per square. And because he dried the ink with hot air, the binder developed thousands of micro-fissures. If you push actual current through that scroll, those micro-fissures will arc like tiny spark plugs. It’s not an energy channel. It’s an expensive heating pad.”
He picked up a six-inch load-bearing framing nail from his desk. The iron was dark, pitted with surface rusting, and fully empty of any sky blessing. Frank clamped the head of the nail with his pliers and began wrapping the stripped copper wire around the shank.
Wrap. Wrap. Wrap.
His fingers moved with the clockwork speed of a heavy-duty winding machine. He didn’t chant. He didn’t burn incense. He didn’t align his chakras with the sky stars. He simply kept uniform tension. He laid down one hundred and twenty tight, overlapping turns of bare copper wire around the iron core, ensuring each loop sat flush against the next without pinching the enamel heat padding.
A sharp neon-amber window snapped into focus in his vision.
Frank gave the last turn a firm pull, cinched the wire, and reached behind him without looking. “Tape.”
Shitou tore off a three-inch strip of black vinyl tape with his teeth and slapped it into Frank’s open palm. Frank wrapped the vinyl tightly around the center of the coil, securing the windings. He took his pocket knife, scraped the enamel coating off the two protruding copper lead ends. Then he bent them into clean right angles.
“Done,” Frank said, tossing his pocket knife onto the desk. “Helical solenoid power-coil with a high-permeability ferrous core. Loop pushback: zero point zero one five ohms. Pure copper, direct coupling.”
Ye Han burst into raucous laughter from the center of the floor. “A nail wrapped in thread?! He stuck a nail into a lump of red string! Elder Gu, look at this farce! This madman mocks the sacred dignity of our guild!”
Elder Gu sneered, waving his hand toward the judge. “Bring the Testing Orb to his table! Let the sacred crystal expose this mortal fraud before the entire assembly!”
The judge carried the brass stone stand over to Frank’s table. It set the quartz sphere down on the marble surface with a disdainful sniff. “You have ten breaths to activate your array, vagrant.”
Frank didn’t bother using spiritual qi. He grabbed the two copper leads of his solenoid with his bare fingers and jammed the pointed tip of the six-inch iron nail straight into the testing stone base’s brass input socket.
Click.
“Circuit closed,” Frank said mildly. “Don’t touch the terminals, boys. It might kick a little.”
For a single heartbeat, nothing happened. Ye Han began to smirk, opening his mouth to deliver a cutting insult. Then, the surrounding physics of the grand hall ceased to function like a poetic scroll and began behaving like high-voltage alternating current encountering a near-zero pushback short circuit.
HUMMMMMMMMM.
The sound didn’t come from the air. It came from the bedrock. A low, underground hum rattled the flat stone slabs, shaking the dust from the lodestone pillars. Frank’s copper coil possessed an internal pushback of only 0.015 ohms. Because of that, the spiritual leylines running beneath the guildhall found a path of near-infinite spark flow rate compared to the millions of ohms choking the surrounding jade arrays.
Spiritual qi didn’t gently trickle into the nail. It surged. A terrifying vortex of raw, raw sky qi was wildly sucked toward Frank’s corner table with the roar of a jet turbine!
WHIRRRRRR-ROOOOAR!
Papers flew from desks across the hall. Inkwells overturned, sending rivers of black and red ink spraying across high-born silk robes. Banners ripped from the high rafters, flapping wildly in the sudden gale that spiraled toward the rusty six-inch nail!
“What’s happening?!” Ye Han shrieked, dropping to his knees and grabbing his desk legs as the ferocious suction pulled at his hairpins.
The quartz Testing Orb on Frank’s stone base didn’t glow green. It flashed a violent, blinding amber.
1,000 SFU. 5,000 SFU. 20,000 SFU.
The silver numerals spun so fast they blurred into a streak of blinding white light. The quartz sphere began to vibrate at thousands of cycles per second. That turned blazing bright white, glowing so bright that examinees shielded their eyes, screaming in agony.
Xiao Yu stood behind Frank, his hands clamped around his steel tuning forks, his face shining with wild excitement. “The wave! It’s not clipping! The magnetic flux is swallowing the entire floor!”
50,000 SFU.
The Testing Orb had reached its maximum theoretical measurement threshold. Then, physics took its certain course.
CRACK-BOOM!
The quartz orb shattered into a million glittering fragments, blowing outward in a bone-shaking blast wave of tightly packed spiritual pressure! The blast swept through the grand hall like a physical battering ram. All twelve towering stained-glass windows along the eastern wall blew outward with a total shriek of shattering glass, showering the courtyard below in colorful shards. Thirty examinees were knocked flat on their backs, rolling across the floor amid overturned ink and howling wind. Ye Han’s precious white silk scroll was torn from his desk, sucked across the room, and slapped flat against the lodestone pillar, its adder red stone smeared into a shapeless red blotch.
When the sky gale finally died down, the grand hall was filled with swirling dust, floating paper scraps, and the heavy smell of burnt ozone.
Frank stood calmly at his desk, brushing a few specks of quartz dust off the shoulder of his denim overalls. He looked down at the testing stone base. The six-inch rusty iron nail was glowing a faint, cheerful orange. It hummed quietly like a contented transformer in an alleyway.
Frank picked up his tea mug, took a sip of lukewarm barley tea. Then he looked up at the dais.
Lead Examiner Elder Gu was slumped halfway over his purple sandalwood throne, his mouth hanging open, his white hair standing wildly on end like an electrified dandelion. His eyes were glazed with catatonic shock.
“The... The First Epoch...” Elder Gu croaked, his voice cracking into a dry wheeze. “The Primordial Magnetic Dragon... Summoned without a brush... Without red stone... Using a carpenter’s spike...”
Frank stepped out from behind his wobbly desk, his heavy boots crunching over the carpet of shattered glass. He walked up to the base of the dais, leaned on the wooden railing. Then he extended his open right hand toward the trembling judge.
“My power-coil blew your meter,” Frank said, his tone entirely matter-of-fact. “According to the town guild charter posted on your front gate, an output exceeding one thousand units grants immediate 1-Star sign-off and wholesale materials supply order.” He tapped his fingers against the railing. “Can I get my token now? I’ve got three hundred feet of channel to pull before sundown. Your front door draft is terrible.”
Elder Gu stared at Frank’s open hand, his chest heaving with choking rage and existential dread.