The five-hundred-foot golden palm hanging in the sky above the tiered arena roared with the heat of a falling tiny sun. Grand Elder Yan Gu’s Tier 8 Saint Domain was a closed, nearby reality bubble where physical mass was crushed beneath ninety sea-weights of golden solar pressure. The dragon-bone marble plaza cracked and groaned beneath the huge gravity slope. Thousands of exam guards and scholars cowered beneath their stone benches, hands clasped over their ears to shut out the howling of high-pressure air.
Yet on the sixth rung of the twenty-four-foot folding light metal ladder, Frank didn’t even look up at the dropping tiny sun. His thumb pressed lightly against the brass measuring tongs, sliding the jaw closed with a soft click.
Before his eyes, the aligned tough clear glass lenses of his safety glasses flickered with a cascade of high-thickness cyan diagnostics:
Frank stared through his dark safety glasses at the huge wall of text that had materialized across the face of the three-hundred-foot black glass obelisk. To the ancient sages and grandmasters who had spent lifetimes meditating in the dust, these glowing glyphs were sacred mysteries of creation, impossible to understand sky mandalas whose contemplation demanded decades of silent fasting and soul refinement. To Frank, it looked like a total building disaster created by an unhinged, sleep-deprived draftsman working seventy-two in a row hours without a check.
