Vice-Principal Lu Xun stumbled backward out of the Headmaster’s Inner Sanctum. He grabbed his reddened cheek where the gold-sealed deed had struck him.
Behind him, the heavy oak doors slammed shut with a finality that shook the hall paintings.
Lu Xun’s fingers clawed into the silk of his robes, his eyes burning with poisonous, desperate hatred. For forty years, Dean Shang had been a numbed invalid who stayed out of campus politics. Now, in the span of a single morning, the Dean was hopping on one foot, slapping senior administrators, and handing out century-long tax-exempt freehold deeds like party favors!
“Lu Zhen...” Lu Xun hissed into the empty hallway, his voice trembling with homicidal malice. “You think you have won because you gave the old fool a cup of healing tea? We shall see how your dog pen survives when the supply chains are cut!”
---
Meanwhile, on the southern ridge of the Hongwu Mountains, Frank walked through the bamboo grove with the red-silk freehold scroll tucked casually beneath his arm.
When he reached the clearing, Shen Shitou, Jiang Ling’er, and Niu Mang were standing in the yard. She held their tools in anxious vigilance.
They saw Frank stroll into the courtyard unharmed. Then, a collective sigh of relief washed over the three students.
“Master!” Shen Shitou called out, hurrying forward with his twenty-pound sledgehammer. “Did the Academic Senate try to execute a reprisal? Student was prepared to lead a demolition charge against the Punishment Hall!”
“Put the hammer down, Shitou,” Frank said, tossing the red-silk scroll onto an overturned nail keg. “Nobody is charging anything. Dean Shang dismissed the eviction notice and signed off on the zoning variance.”
The three students crowded around the nail keg.
Jiang Ling’er carefully unrolled the scroll with respectful fingertips.
Her eyes landed on the royal dragon seal and the gold-threaded calligraphy granting Classroom 404 permanent. Then, total freehold sovereignty over the entire mountain ridge, her breath caught in her throat.
“Master...” Ling’er whispered, her golden eyes glistening with tears. “This is... An Royal Freehold Mandate! In our Great Da-Qi Empire, only Saint Kings and Ancestral Grandmasters are granted sovereign territorial enclaves exempt from royal taxation! Master has carved out an independent Daoist Sanctum in the mortal plane!”
Niu Mang stared with wide, glowing eyes, gazing at the scroll in worshipful awe. “Master’s territory! This mountain belongs to Master forever!”
Frank pulled a pencil from behind his ear and tapped the edge of the parchment.
“More importantly,” Frank noted with practical satisfaction, “it means we have a complete town zoning exemption. No building permits needed, no setback inspections, and zero property tax on outbuildings. That means we don’t have to wait for any elder planning committee to approve our foundation pour.”
Frank unclipped his twenty-five-foot tape measure. Then he walked over to the sagging eastern wall of Classroom 404.
He hooked the brass tab against the rotting timber doorstep plate. Then he pulled the tape taut across the outer edge.
“The ground freeze is going to hit in three weeks,” Frank announced. He turned to his crew. “This timber shack has no foundation footings. The doorstep plate is sitting directly on bare dirt, which is why moisture is wicking into the pine wall studs and the termites are treating the floorboards like an all-you-can-eat buffet.”
Frank pulled out his DAO-QA screen, opening his load-bearing building workspace.
“Today’s training list,” Frank declared, rolling up the sleeves of his grey robes, “is civil building and concrete batching. We’re pouring an eight-inch heavy nonstop footing around the entire outer edge of this structure.”
The three students exchanged looks of fanatical enthusiasm.
They didn’t know what “civil building” or “concrete batching” meant, but they understood that Master Lu was preparing to cast the ancient foundation of the sect!
“Master!” Niu Mang roared, slamming his trench spade into the dirt. “Where should student dig?!”
“Here,” Frank took his blue chalk and snapped a straight chalk line eight inches outside the wooden walls, forming a nonstop box-shaped outer edge around the entire four-hundred-square-foot shack.
“Niu Mang,” Frank commanded. “Excavate this trench twelve inches wide, eighteen inches deep. Scrape the bottom flat down to solid mountain stone. Keep the sidewalls plumb at ninety degrees.”
“Student will make it flat as a mirror!” Niu Mang bellowed.
He leaped into the trench, his sharpened hard dark metal spade blurring into a black glass flash!
Thwack! Scoop! Thwack! Scoop!
With every downward drive of Niu Mang’s bare heel, the earth-force of the Ancient Primal Bull shook through the soil. He scooped out three hundred pounds of shale dirt per minute. He cast the spoil neatly into an even berm five feet from the trench.
Frank turned to Shen Shitou.
“Shitou, follow me to the quarry scrap pile.”
Behind the shack lay hundreds of rusted, discarded iron reinforcement rods from an old mining track abandoned fifty years ago.
Frank pulled out a heavy bolt cutter from his tool box.
“We need forty pieces of half-inch iron bar cut to ten-foot lengths,” Frank said. “Bend the ends at ninety degrees with a four-inch hook. We’re assembling a load-bearing iron rods cage.”
“Student obeys!” Shitou didn’t even use the bolt cutter.
He picked up a half-inch iron rod, set it across his bronze knee. Then he pulled with his bare hands.
SNAP.
The iron rod snapped cleanly at the exact ten-foot mark.
Shitou placed the end between his bronze thumb and forefinger, applying eighty tons of star-forged high-pressure grip. With a soft grunt, he bent the cold-rolled iron into a perfect ninety-degree load-bearing hook with machine-like accuracy!
Within twenty minutes, Shitou had bent forty reinforcement bars and was tying them into a rigid two-layer iron rods cage using lengths of thin iron wire, his fingers moving like a weaver working on a steel loom.
Meanwhile, Frank was standing beside three massive wooden troughs he had built from scrap lumber.
He grabbed a shovel and began batching the raw materials.
“Ancient water-setting high-pressure concrete,” Frank explained to Jiang Ling’er, who was watching intently with her sleeves rolled up. Back on Earth, the ancient Romans had used this exact chemistry to build monuments that stood for two thousand years. The physics of calcium-stone-glass crystal-forming didn’t change just because people threw magic charms around. “Modern fighters think load-bearing stonework was invented yesterday. When fiery ash reacts with calcium hydroxide and water, it forms calcium-stone-glass-hydrate crystals that grow stronger over hundreds of years, even underwater.”
Frank dumped four bags of wet lime plaster into the trough. He added three shovels of dark fiery ash gathered from the quarry base, six wheelbarrows of crushed 9.8mm dark rock gravel from Shitou’s demolished boulder, and three buckets of clear well water.
“Mix it, Shitou,” Frank commanded.
Shitou grabbed a heavy wooden hoe and churned the gray aggregate mix with the tireless rhythm of a heavy-duty cement mixer.
Slosh. Slosh. Churn.
The mixture turned into a thick, uniform, slate-grey slurry that smelled of wet limestone and crushed minerals.
“Trench is ready, Master!” Niu Mang shouted from around the corner.
Frank inspected the trench. The solid mountain stone at the bottom was swept fully clean of loose dust, and Shitou’s iron rods cage sat suspended two inches off the rock on small stone chairs, perfectly centered.
“Pour it,” Frank ordered.
For the next half hour, the four of them moved with seamless builder smooth speed.
Shitou and Niu Mang hauled heavy cedar buckets of wet concrete slurry. It poured the aggregate evenly around the outer edge trench. Frank followed behind with a flat wooden screed board, tamping the slurry to remove air pockets and leveling the top edge flush with his chalk lines.
Within forty minutes, a clean, eight-inch-wide concrete footing hugged the base of Classroom 404. He locked the timber framing into an unmoving, rock-solid embrace.
Frank wiped his brow, turning to Jiang Ling’er.
“Ling’er, here’s where you come in.”
Ling’er stepped up to the edge of the wet grey trench, her golden eyes glowing with excitement. “What should student do, Master?”
“Standard concrete takes twenty-eight days to reach its design crushing strength through natural hydration,” Frank said. “We don’t have twenty-eight days. We have a check in twenty-four hours.”
Frank pointed at the surface of the wet concrete.
“I need you to hover your hands three inches above the slurry and project a low-speed, ninety-degree steam envelope across the entire outer edge. Keep the moisture saturation at one hundred percent so the water doesn’t boil off, but speed up the chemical curing reaction.”
Ling’er smiled radiantly. “Sped up heat hydration! Student understands!”
She extended her slender arms.
PSSSSSSSSSSST.
A gentle, shimmering curtain of pure golden solar dragon steam flowed from her palms, cascading over the concrete footing like a ghostly morning fog.
The heat was exactly controlled, never scorching, never boiling.
Deep within the wet grey slurry, the calcium-stone-glass-hydrate reaction went into hyperdrive!
Millions of tiny crystal-clear needles erupted through the mortar. It locked the crushed dark rock gravel and the iron rods into an iron-hard, massive stone lattice!
The grey concrete turned dark, dense, and glossy as polished black glass!
In thirty minutes, the entire outer edge footing reached a crushing strength of over six thousand pounds of pressure—exceeding the load rating of a military castle bunker!
Frank bent down, tapped the cured concrete with the steel head of his framing square.
TINK!
The hammer rebounded with a high, clear, bell-like ring.
Zero cracks. Zero settlement voids. One hundred percent massive stone integration with the bedrock!
Frank’s DAO-QA console lit up with triumphant emerald text.
A warm, pleasant pulse of golden energy flushed through Frank’s core, increasing the balance of his micro-star-fire reactor.
Shen Shitou, Jiang Ling’er, and Niu Mang stood around the glossy, black glass-black foundation. She looked upon it with trembling, religious veneration.
In less than an afternoon, Shitou thought, his heart quaking, Master has cast an Ancient Void-Locking Foundation that anchors this shack directly to the earth-shaking spine of the continent! Even if the world shatters, this classroom will remain standing for eternity!
Before Frank could fetch a broom to clean the tools, the sound of galloping hooves echoed from the mountain path.
A junior academy courier clad in official blue messenger robes pulled his mount to a skidding halt at the courtyard gate.
The courier looked at the glossy black stone footing hugging the shack, blinked in confusion, then unrolled an official office notice bearing the wax crest of the Academic Senate:
“Teacher Lu Zhen!” the courier announced breathlessly. “By decree of Dean Shang Chen, Classroom 404 is officially raised to an Independent Academic Department!”
The courier lowered his voice, looking around nervously before leaning down from his saddle:
“However, Master Lu... Vice-Principal Lu’s faction has convened the Merchant Trade ring! As of noon today, every supply depot, herb medicine room, and wholesale warehouse in Tianxuan has placed Classroom 404 under a total Resource Trade Embargo! You’re barred from purchasing a single spirit stone or healing herb!”
Frank set down his trowel, wiped his hands on a rag, and let out a dry, amused chuckle.
“A retail trade embargo?” Frank asked, shaking his head. “They think they can starve a builder by locking the front doors of a marked-up gift shop?”
Frank turned to his students, pointing toward the storage shed.
“Pack up the tools, kids. Wash the shovels. Tomorrow morning, we’re taking three wheelbarrows down to the East City scrap yards. It’s time for some wholesale salvage.”