The Grand Hall had barely settled after the iron rods test before the heavy iron-heavy doors were kicked wide open.
SLAM!
Cold mountain gales rushed through the entrance. It carried the sharp, rhythmic stomping of sixteen pairs of iron-soled military boots. Marching into the hall were twelve Regional Pavilion Arbiters draped in flowing silver-trimmed robes, their belts hung with the heavy bronze scales of royal justice.
Leading the contingent was Master Teacher Envoy Wu. Having scrubbed the dark rock gravel and humiliation from his scarlet robes after the morning’s tollgate disaster, Envoy Wu now carried himself with the manic venom of a bureaucrat wielding martial law. In his right hand, Wu hoisted a heavy scroll of crimson sheepskin bound with black dragon sinew—the Royal Execution Writ.
“Halt all proceedings!” Envoy Wu bellowed, his voice echoing off the lodestone rafters. “Under the emergency martial power of the Grand Hegemonic Regional Master Teacher Pavilion, this entire assembly is frozen!”
Grandmaster Feng frowned, stepping between Frank and the newly arrived trial. “Envoy Wu, the Thousand-Rune Formation Guild operates under royal charter. What business does the Master Teacher Pavilion have interrupting a formal guild sign-off?”
“This man is no formation master!” Wu shrieked, pointing his trembling fly-whisk directly at Frank’s chest. “His real name is Lu Zhen! He’s a disgraced junior teacher from the backwater Tianxuan Principality, running with a suspicious 1-Star teaching license that has zero validity in the Hegemonic Frontier!”
The high-born examinees gasped, whispering among themselves as they stared at Frank’s oil-stained overalls. Envoy Wu puffed out his chest, stepping up the dais with arrogant strides.
“We have received formal complaints from border guard posts and reputable clans,” Wu announced, unfurling the crimson writ with a dramatic snap. “Lu Zhen has established an illicit, uninspected cult! He lures noble children into menial labor, forces royal princesses to scrub pipe fittings, and uses fraudulent ironmongery to deceive innocent grandmasters!”
Frank stood leaning against the judge’s lectern, his ankles crossed. He reached into his chest pocket, pulled out a small brown paper bag of salted, roasted pumpkin seeds. Then he cracked one open between his front teeth.
Snap.
“Nice paperwork,” Frank remarked, brushing a seed hull off his thumb. “Good rag content in that parchment. Heavyweight. But your margins are uneven, and whoever signed the bottom left an ugly ink blot on the seal.”
Envoy Wu’s face darkened with vicious rage. “Mock all you want, vagrant! Under Chapter Four, Section Twelve of the Imperial Master Teacher Code, a teacher whose credentials are challenged must prove his pedagogical validity on the spot! You must guide an apprentice through a multi-tier training bottleneck in public view under the Heart-Inquiry Bell!”
Wu waved his hand toward the northern wall of the hall. Suspended from an iron gallows hung a huge bell forged from ancient soul-sounding bronze. Beside the bell stood a massive, sixty-ton columnar monolith of black cold-iron, inscribed with thirty-six physical endurance magic charms.
“This is the Heavenly Testing Pillar!” Envoy Wu declared coldly. “Your senior apprentice, Shen Shitou, has been trapped at the peak of Mortal Tier 3 for nearly a year. If you can’t guide him to shatter his bottleneck before this entire trial within fifty breaths, your teaching credentials are permanently revoked! You’ll be branded a royal heretic and beheaded in the guard post square!”
The twelve Arbiters stepped forward all at once, resting their palms against the handles of their execution broadswords. The air grew heavy with the choking pressure of twelve peak Foundation and early Golden Core auras.
Grandmaster Feng’s brow furrowed with genuine worry. “Envoy Wu, this is absurd! Forcing a physical body-refining fighter to break through to the Golden Core tier in fifty breaths is impossible! It takes months of healing baths and quiet focus!”
“The law is the law!” Wu snarled, his eyes fixed on Frank like a hawk watching a field mouse. “Let’s see if his uninspected scrap metal can forge a true sky core!”
Frank didn’t even look at the Arbiters. He spat another pumpkin seed hull into his palm and tapped his temples. A neon-amber test window snapped open in his vision, wrapping Shen Shitou’s towering frame in a glowing three-space-folding wireframe skeleton.
Frank read the system breakdown, shaking his head with a quiet, fed up cluck of his tongue.
“Thirty breaths remain!” Envoy Wu shouted with triumphant glee. “He’s silent! He has no answers! Guards, prepare the execution chains!”
“Shitou,” Frank called out lazily, not even raising his voice.
“Yes, Master,” Shitou grunted, stepping forward like an iron mountain. He unslung his twenty-pound forged steel sledgehammer from his back, resting the massive head on the floor.
“Walk over to that iron pillar,” Frank instructed, chewing on another seed. “You’re going to strike it once.”
“Strike it?” Envoy Wu laughed mockingly. “The Heavenly Testing Pillar was forged by royal grandmasters! It needs sky spiritual arts! A crude mortal hammer swing can’t even scratch its paint!”
“Pay attention to your stance, Shitou,” Frank continued, ignoring the screaming envoy entirely. “You’ve been swinging that hammer all morning, and you’re slouching. Every time you bring the head back, you’re pitching your torso forward by three point two degrees.”
Shitou froze, his thick eyebrows knitting together as he listened with intense concentration.
“When you lean forward like that,” Frank said, gesturing with his half-eaten seed, “you’re pinching your L4 and L5 spine bones together like a pair of rusty pliers. That pinch is constricting your thigh high-pressure lines and choking the fluid return from your lower spirit veins. You’re trying to muscle a twenty-pound head with your lower back like an amateur chopping firewood.”
Xiao Yu, holding his tuning forks, tilted his head. “Master, the flow through his spine is churning. It sounds like water churning in a kinked hose.”
“Exactly,” Frank said. “Kinked hose. Shitou, step up to the pillar. Pivot your left heel two inches outward to open your hip socket. Straighten your lower-back spine so your crown is plumb with your tailbone. Let your right shoulder drop naturally along the clockwork lever arm. Don’t fight the weight. Let gravity and outward-pulling torque do the work.”
Shen Shitou stood before the sixty-ton black iron pillar. The twelve Arbiters sneered. Envoy Wu pulled a golden pocket watch from his sash, raising his hand to give the execution signal. “Ten breaths! Prepare to die, Lu Zhen!”
Shitou took a deep breath. He looked down at his boots. He lifted his left boot, shifting the heavy heel outward by exactly two inches. Then, he rolled his hips back, straightened his broad back. Then he lined up his massive neck until his spine formed a perfectly upright, unbroken column of bone and sinew.
CLICK.
The sound was subtle, like the latch of an iron gate falling into place. In the next heartbeat, Shen Shitou’s internal reality snapped into place.
His physical spine bones lined up with true plumb. Then, the constricting pressure on his lower-back nerves vanished. The heavy silver-steel-heavy dark metal channels that made up his Primordial Star-Forged Iron Body. It had been choked and churning for nine months, suddenly found a fully zero-drag, straight-line return path.
WHOOOOOOSH!
The spiritual blood in Shitou’s veins didn’t merely circulate. It reached water-flow faster-than-sound speed! A blinding golden radiance erupted from every pore of Shitou’s skin, displacing the surrounding air with a blistering blast wave of pure gravity pressure!
CRACK-BOOM!
High above, the roof of the grand hall split along its center seam as a four-hundred-foot pillar of star-forged golden aura blasted straight through the lodestone stonework into the heavens! Inside Shitou’s lower belly, the huge water-flow torque tightly packed his swirling spiritual fluid at forty million sea-weights of pressure. The liquid snapped into solid crystal-clear perfection. A 9-Pattern Star-Forged Golden Core—dense as a neutron star, streaming the raw gravity weight of a dwarf sun—ignited in his dantian!
Mortal Tier 4: Golden Core Realm!
Shitou didn’t even notice the heavens opening above him. He was entirely focused on his master’s instructions about the lever arm. With his hips unlocked and his spine perfectly lined up, Shitou allowed his right shoulder to drop. The twenty-pound sledgehammer arced backward in a smooth, easy circle of clockwork torque.
SWOOOOOOSH!
The hammer head broke the sound barrier. It dragged an empty pocket cone of tightly packed white vapor behind it as it slammed into the center of the sixty-ton iron pillar!
CLANGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!
The sound was world-ending. The sixty-ton columnar monolith of solid cold-iron didn’t merely ring. Under the perfectly lined up moving load, the entire sixty-ton iron pillar was driven four feet deep into the solid dark rock foundation of the guildhall, like a wooden peg hammered into soft butter!
A massive circular blast wave tore outward across the floor, lifting flat stone slabs and sending a hurricane of wind howling through the hall! High above on the gallows, the ancient bronze Heart-Inquiry Bell—silent for two hundred years—was caught in the ringing wave.
DONG!
The bell tolled.
DONG! DONG! DONG!
It didn’t stop at three tolls, the standard mark of an ordinary breakthrough. It rang twelve times. Twenty-four times. Thirty-six times! The sky bronze shook with frantic joy, reaching forty-eight, sixty, and finally. Seventy-two thunderous tolls that echoed fifty miles across the frozen frontier!
Seventy-two tolls: The Supreme Heavenly Decree of an Indestructible Core!
Envoy Wu’s golden pocket watch slipped from his numbed fingers, hitting the floor and shattering against a cracked flat stone slab. His fly-whisk fell from limp hands. His eyes were fully vacant. He stared at the sixty-ton pillar buried four feet in the floor, and at the golden sun-like aura streaming from the quiet youth holding a carpenter’s hammer.
“One... One sentence...” Wu whimpered, his legs turning to jelly as he staggered back against the wall. “He didn’t bestow a pill... He didn’t recite scripture... He moved his foot two inches... And forged a 9-Pattern Golden Core?!”
The twelve Regional Pavilion Arbiters lowered their execution broadswords, their hands trembling wildly. Stunned into silence, they backed away from Frank’s lectern, bowing deeply with stiff, scared formality.
“A Master Teacher of the highest order,” the chief Judge whispered, his voice shaking. “Physical body leverage harmonizing with the primal leylines... He sees the skeleton of Heaven and Earth as plain as day!”
Frank popped another pumpkin seed into his mouth, chewed thoughtfully, and looked down at Shitou. “Much better follow-through,” Frank remarked with an approving nod. “Zero lower-back strain. The torque carried through the shoulder cleanly. Remember that stance when we start driving foundation piles tomorrow.”
“Yes, Master,” Shitou rumbled, bowing his head with total devotion.
Frank dusted the salt off his hands and looked across the wreckage toward Envoy Wu, who was currently clutching the leg of a shattered desk. He gasped for breath. “Hey, Envoy. Is the fifty breaths up? Because I think my apprentice just passed your test.”