The four heavy wooden wagons groaned as they rolled past the grand marble gates of Hongwu Academy.
Iron-rimmed wheels rattled over cobblestones, kicking up pale dust. Behind the draft horses, stacked under greased canvas tarpaulins, were dozens of seasoned pine timbers, iron kegs of quick-setting high-pressure lime, coiled rings of copper wire, and an eighty-four-pound metal bar of black-gold ore.
Near the central courtyard, students from Class 1 and Class 2 paused their morning sword drills in sheer disbelief.
“Look at that!” a Class 1 student sneered, pointing with his sword sheath. “Is that Class 404? What on earth are they hauling?”
“Seasoned lumber? Mortar kegs? Coils of cheap wire?” a sleek-haired youth scoffed loudly. “Teacher Lu has abandoned training entirely! He’s turned his students into a glorified construction crew!”
“They’re just unpaid day laborers,” a Class 2 girl giggled behind her silk fan. “Imagine joining Hongwu Academy just to push wheelbarrows of dung and haul timber like serfs!”
A chorus of haughty laughter echoed across the flat stone slabs.
Walking behind the second wagon, Niu Mang’s thick knuckles whitened on the cedar handles. “Teacher... They insult our lineage. Should I show them how we split bedrock?”
“Save your calories for the framing,” Frank replied without breaking stride. “People who hold uncalloused swords always mock the ones carrying hammers. That’s because they’ve never replaced a rotted doorstep plate in their lives. Ignore the peanut gallery. We have twelve load-bearing rafters to seat before sundown.”
Ling’er walked beside the lead wagon, her silver eyes cool as winter ice. “Teacher is correct. Those who flap their lips understand nothing of foundational stonework. Let the frogs croak.”
Frank led the convoy down the steep path to the neglected western ridge, halting before the rickety ruin of Classroom 404.
The roof sagged like a broken spine. Three paper window screens had rotted away entirely, flapping in the mountain breeze.
Frank stood in the courtyard with hands on his hips, taking in the load-bearing disaster.
“Alright,” Frank announced, clapping his work gloves together. “First order of business before anyone steps foot under that porch. Rule one of any active job site: Personal Protective Equipment.”
He reached into the lead wagon and pulled out three bizarre hemispherical objects.
They were dried iron-skin gourds, sanded smooth and painted with bright yellow red stone lacquer. Frank had glued thick pads of folded felt and hemp cloth along the inner rims, fitting them with adjustable rawhide chin straps.
Frank tossed one to each student.
“Hard hats,” Frank commanded flatly. “Put them on. Fasten the straps under your chins. If a two-by-four drops from the rafters while you’re mortising a joint, I don’t want your skull providing the slowdown curve. No hat, no entry to the site. Zero limit.”
Shitou held the bright yellow gourd helmet in both hands.
His broad face hardened with solemn respect. The lacquered surface gleamed, streaming a faint scent of pine pitch. To Shitou’s spiritual senses, the helmet was shaped like an ancient defensive canopy, curved to deflect heavenly thunderbolts from the Baihui spirit vein!
“A Heavenly Warding Crown...” Shitou whispered in awe. “Teacher has forged protective crowns to shield our spiritual minds from the backlash of world-forging!”
Niu Mang strapped his yellow gourd onto his massive skull, snapping the rawhide buckle tightly. He thumped the top of his head with an iron fist. THUD.
“Solid!” Niu Mang grinned broadly. “Not even a falling anvil could rattle my brain now!”
Ling’er tucked her dark bangs neatly beneath the hemp padding and secured the strap. Her stance became upright. “Students thank Teacher for bestowing the Ancient object of Safe Labor!”
Frank pinched the bridge of his nose. “It’s a dried squash with felt padding, kids. Don’t write poetry about it. Grab the crowbars.”
For the next four hours, the western courtyard transformed into a whirlwind of furious carpentry.
Frank chalked straight blue snap-lines across warped floorboards, barking rhythmic orders that kept all three students moving like timed together gears.
“Shitou, pry up those rotted pine planks along the north wall. Watch for rusty square-headed nails. Drop them in the bucket. Nobody steps on a tetanus trap on my watch!”
“Understood!” Shitou roared. He jammed an iron crowbar beneath the rotten floor. With his Tier 1 Layer 9 Earth-Vein strength, six-foot sections of rotted oak flew upward with clean, ear-splitting CRACKS.
“Niu Mang, take the broadaxe. We need twenty-four two-foot blocking studs. Hew them square to the chalk line. Off by an eighth of an inch. The wall racks when the wind hits forty knots.”
“Leaving it to me, Teacher!” Niu Mang swung his heavy iron axe with machine-like care, splitting pine beams into mirror-smooth space-folding lumber with single, fluid strokes.
Frank set up an improvised steam-bending rig using a hollow copper pipe mounted over a small charcoal fire. Hot sulfur-laced steam softened dense ash strips. It allowed Frank to bend them into curved jambs for double-hung sash windows.
Ling’er worked at the bench, carefully chiseling wood slot-and-wooden peg joints under Frank’s exacting gaze.
“Keep the chisel at thirty degrees, Ling’er,” Frank corrected calmly, tapping her wrist. “Push with your hips, not your fingers. Wood grain has shear vectors just like granite. Respect the fiber, and the joint seats itself.”
Ling’er’s heart trembled. ‘Respect the fiber, and the joint seats itself...’
To her, that was the deep principle of the Heavenly Dao’s intrinsic grain. By aligning her blade with the natural grain of matter, her Frost-Flame Qi smoothed its jagged edges. It slid between plant fiber fibers without burning a single cell!
By mid-afternoon, the load-bearing framing was fully replaced.
Sturdy pine studs stood upright along every wall. Double-hung sash windows with lead balance weights slid up and down with silent perfection. The sagging rafters had been jacked straight with screw-props and heavy with twin collar ties.
Classroom 404 was no longer a crooked shack. It had got the rigid skeleton of a castle.
Yet Frank stood in the center of the cleared floor. Then, his DAO-QA screen pulsed with persistent amber tracking data.
Frank frowned at the readout.
“Look at this floating ground,” Frank muttered under his breath, shaking his head. “No wonder students in this hall kept coughing blood during quiet focus. The building sits on dry dirt with zero spark reference. Stray static charges have nowhere to fade. Internal power creates back-EMF that bounces between walls like an echo chamber!”
In the training world, Classroom 404 had suffered from a “Fierce Spectral Qi Vortex.”
Dozens of failed teachers had blamed cursed ley lines. To Frank, it was high-voltage static floating on an ungrounded backup circuit—a basic spark code rule-break.
Frank turned to the supply wagon. “Bring out the three coils of copper wire and the eight-foot copper rod!”
Shitou hauled the heavy copper rod and wire coils into the room.
“What’s this divine instrument, Teacher?” Shitou asked with deep awe. “Does it channel Nine Heavens Lightning?”
“It’s a ground rod, Shitou,” Frank said. He pulled wire strippers and a grounding clamp from his tool belt. “Everything generates static friction. When you meditate, your nervous system pumps micro-currents. Without a ground reference, charge accumulates on your skin, creates magnetic-pull coupling, and ruins concentration. We’re grounding the building.”
Frank uncoiled the copper wire.
Working with swift movements, he stapled the nonstop bare copper guide-rod along the bottom of every floor beam, bonding each corner in a seamless outer edge ring. He linked window frames, the stove hood, and heavy door hinges to the central wire.
Finally, Frank drilled a two-inch hole straight through the hardwood floor. He exposed dark quarry bedrock below.
He set the pointed tip of the eight-foot copper rod into the hole.
“Shitou,” Frank said, pointing at the rod. “Grab the twenty-pound sledgehammer. Drive this rod straight into the bedrock. All eight feet. Leave four inches sticking up for the grounding lug.”
Shitou’s eyes widened. “Into solid bedrock, Teacher?”
“Yes. Full depth. Don’t mushroom the head; swing straight down.”
Shitou took a deep breath. He adjusted his bright yellow gourd hard hat, planted his feet in horse stance. Then he hoisted the twenty-pound iron sledgehammer above his shoulder.
His Earth-Vein Qi ignited. An amber glow rolled down his forearms like molten lava.
BOOM!
The hammer smashed into the copper head. A sharp blast wave drove the rod two feet into solid stone!
BOOM!
Another thunderous strike echoed off the hills, sinking another two feet!
BOOM!
With a final smash that rattled dust from roof shingles, the copper rod seated itself flush into the mountain’s bedrock. That left exactly four inches exposed.
Frank stepped forward with a brass ground clamp and an adjustable wrench. He wrapped the outer edge loop around the rod, tightened the heavy bronze bolt until copper strands bit deeply into metal. Then he torqued it down with a sharp CLACK.
The instant the circuit closed, the entire mountain seemed to exhale.
HUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.
A low, ringing shaking hum surged through the floorboards.
The chaotic spiritual winds that had plagued the western ridge for three hundred years vanished. The jagged, churning energy in the air—uneven, static-laden, and prickly to the skin—was instantly captured by the nonstop copper loop and channeled harmlessly into the vast underground mass of the planet!
Without static back-EMF choking the room, the mountain’s natural spiritual veins poured into the void like water rushing into an open canal.
Inside Classroom 404, surrounding spiritual thickness surged by four hundred percent!
Yet it wasn’t violent. It didn’t swirl in a storm or threaten spirit veins. It became as smooth and pure as a mountain spring, circulating in gentle, smooth-flowing waves through the pine-scented air.
Ling’er gasped, clutching her chest. Her frost-burned spirit veins relaxed, bathed in a never seen before sea of zero-drag energy. “The air... It feels like pure sky dew! All the wild rough churning is gone!”
Niu Mang touched the polished floorboards in awe. “I can breathe without my chest aching! Teacher... You didn’t just repair a shack... You bound the pulse of the earth itself!”
Frank wiped a speck of copper dust from his wrench and placed it back into his leather pouch.
“That,” Frank said with a satisfied nod, “is why you always install a nonstop equipment grounding guide-rod. Code exists for a reason, kids. Now grab the brooms. We still need to sweep up the sawdust before we lay down the finish.”
Outside, standing on the distant courtyard terrace, several Class 1 students stared toward the western ridge in utter confusion.
“Did you feel that tremor?” one asked, rubbing his neck. “Why did the mountain’s spiritual wind suddenly get so quiet?”
“Bah, probably just those idiots in Class 404 collapsing their own roof,” the lead student sneered. He turned back to his wooden sword. “Let them play carpenter. In two weeks, the tournament will crush them anyway.”
Inside Classroom 404, beneath the freshly squared pine rafters and safe under their yellow gourd helmets, the three students stood in an ocean of four-hundred-percent pure spiritual energy. They smiled with quiet, terrifying excitement.