Shen Shitou struggled to stand upright, his bare feet unsteady on the white flat stone slabs.
His knees shook, his breath rattling in his chest like loose gravel in an iron drum. Yet despite the agony, his chin came up with the ingrained pride of a fallen swordsman.
“Master,” Shitou rasped. He pulled his shoulders back and raising his trembling right arm into an arched, delicate curve. “Even if my spirit veins are clogged with melted rock waste... I can still show the first three forms of the Shen Clan’s Nine-Petal Lotus Sword Art! If Master can guide my sword fingers—”
“Drop your arm,” Frank interrupted, not even looking up as he packed his measuring tape into his pouch. “You look like a broken coat rack trying to catch a pigeon.”
Shitou froze. His arm hung awkwardly in midair.
“The Nine-Petal Lotus style,” Shitou whispered, confusion flickering across his mud-streaked face. “It’s our old family Grandmaster technique. It needs thirteen fluid wrist rotations per second to channel the breeze into cutting edge...”
“Thirteen wrist rotations on forty-two tiny fraction of an inch heavy-gauge pipe,” Frank sighed. He stepped around the table and folding his arms. “Do you know what happens when you run a high-rpm back-and-forth cam on a dry, ungreased four-inch steam pipe? You strip the threads, blow the rubber rings, and snap the drive shaft clean off.”
Frank reached out, grabbed Shitou’s wrist with calloused fingers, and forced his arm down.
“Your skeletal structure is solid cast iron,” Frank said, tapping the young man’s collarbone. “Your shoulder girdle is broad enough to mount a diesel engine. You have the leverage and mass spreading of a heavy-duty pile-driver, and some idiot has spent ten years trying to teach you how to knit silk doilies with your fingertips.”
Shitou swallowed hard. The words sounded fully alien, yet an inexplicable warmth flared deep within his chest where his bones met his sinews.
For ten years, his father and the clan elders had beaten him with willow switches for his “coarse, heavy clumsiness.” They had cursed his broad shoulders and thick wrists, lamenting that he lacked the slender, graceful willow-frame needed for high-tier swordsmanship.
“I was... Too heavy?” Shitou stammered. “My father said grace was the only path to the Heavenly Dao.”
“Your father doesn’t understand simple lever mechanics,” Frank replied bluntly. “You don’t hire a crane to do dental surgery. You don’t use a razor knife to demolish a concrete bridge. Stand straight. Feet shoulder-width apart.”
Frank unclipped his heavy-gauge carpenter’s tape measure from his belt.
Zzzzz-click.
The yellow steel tape snapped out with a sharp metal hiss. Frank hooked the brass tab against Shitou’s left shoulder, extended it across his chest. Then he noted the distance.
Next, Frank wrapped the tape around Shitou’s forearm. He measured the dense, corded musculature beneath the acid scars.
Frank clicked the tape measure back into its housing with a satisfied snap.
“Just as I thought,” Frank murmured. “Trying to force high-hum needle shakes through an iron anvil. Total motion mismatch.”
Frank walked around the rickety registration table, bent down. Then he reached into the damp grass beneath a rotting town timber pile.
A few moments later, his fingers emerged gripping a long, ash-wood handle caked in dry clay and cobwebs.
With a casual grunt, Frank hauled the implement out and leaned it against the edge of the desk.
It was an old, battered, twenty-pound demolition sledgehammer.
Its head was an eight-sided block of coarse, drop-forged high-carbon steel, scarred by decades of breaking quarry boulders and driving town boundary stakes. The ash handle was dark with age, rough-hewn. Then it bound with a single strip of rusty iron wire near the throat to prevent splitting.
Shen Shitou stared at the rusted implement, his jaw slack.
“Master...” Shitou whispered. “This is... A quarry worker’s stone-breaker?”
“It’s a twenty-pound forged sledgehammer,” Frank corrected him. “Balance is slightly front-heavy, but the hardened head has zero micro-fractures. It’s got good mass and solid moving transfer. Take it.”
Shitou paused.
In the Divine Sword Clan, weapons were sacred relics. True swordsmen spent years polishing their blades with white jade powder, reciting ancient mantras, and meditating beneath the autumn moon to nurture their “Sword Soul.”
To touch a crude, heavy iron mallet was considered the ultimate degradation. Work fit only for uncultivated beast-laborers and convict miners.
“Master,” Shitou’s voice shook. “My clan taught that... The sword is the gentleman of weapons. A hammer is... Vulgar...”
“A sword is a piece of sharpened sheet metal that bends when you hit a rock,” Frank said deadpan. “This hammer will crack the rock, crack the sword, and crack the guy holding the sword. Pick it up, or go back to lying in the mud.”
Gritting his teeth, Shen Shitou stepped forward. He reached out with his blistered, acid-scarred right hand and wrapped his fingers around the rough ash handle.
He lifted the twenty-pound head off the ground. Then, a jolt of pure physical gravity surged through his arm.
His spine naturally arched to compensate for the forward load. His hips shifted backward, his balance point dropped two inches. His knees locked into the flat stone slabs with the solid balance of an ancient cedar tree.
Clack.
Deep within his chest, the painful pressure behind his chest bone—the horrific “high-pressure lock” that had tortured him for three years—eased by a hair’s breadth.
Because the weight was heavy enough, his broad shoulders were forced to align properly. His 42mm channels, earlier twisted and tightly packed by the clan’s delicate sword postures, straightened out into a clean, parallel posture!
Shen Shitou’s eyes went wide. His breath caught in his throat.
My chest doesn’t burn.
He swung the hammer slightly, testing its balance. The weight felt natural, comforting—an extension of his own dense skeleton. The sickening dizziness that always accompanied his attempts to channel sword qi vanished fully.
This isn’t a vulgar quarry hammer, Shitou realized, his heart thumping against his ribs. This is a Divine Ancient Cleansing Scepter, disguised in the shape of a mortal tool to deceive the prying eyes of the Heavenly Dao! Master saw through my physical stonework in a single glance.
Tears welled in Shitou’s eyes. He held the rusted sledgehammer tight against his ribs.
“Master...” Shitou bowed low, the heavy hammer head resting securely against his shoulder. “This student understands! I shall carry Master’s divine tool with my life!”
Frank picked up his enamel mug, took another sip of tea. Then he gave Shitou a sideways glance.
“It’s just a ten-dollar sledgehammer, kid. Don’t hug it. You’ll get rust flakes on your tunic. Rest it on your shoulder and keep your back straight. You’re carrying it so you build up your forearm strength before we start tearing down the rotted timbers at the shack.”
Frank stepped out from behind the booth, checking his pocket watch.
“It’s nearly noon,” Frank noted. “We have three hours before the registry desk closes for the day. If we don’t find two more bodies, Vice-Principal Lu is going to repossess my classroom and throw us both into the gravel pit. Follow me.”
“Yes, Master!” Shitou barked with fanatical enthusiasm, marching behind Frank like an armored juggernaut, his rusted sledgehammer resting proudly across his broad shoulder.
They bypassed the central plaza, where crowds were still clamoring around the noble pavilions. Frank steered them toward the northern outer edge. An unpaved dirt path that wound behind the academy’s grand equestrian stables and compost silos.
“Master,” Shitou asked respectfully, keeping two paces behind, “why are we heading toward the stables? The high-born prodigies are all gathered at the Spirit Root Testing Pavilions in the center.”
“High-born prodigies are overpriced liabilities,” Frank said, stepping over a puddle of stale rainwater. “They come with entitled attitudes, helicopter parents, and bad clockwork habits. You spend six months unlearning their terrible postures before you can even teach them how to swing a wrench. What we need is raw, raw stock. Overlooked materials with high pulling limit.”
They rounded the corner of the grand cedar stables. Then, the smell of damp horse manure and wet straw thickened.
Then, without warning, the surrounding heat plummeted.
Hiss...
A sudden, unnatural chill swept across the dirt path. The damp puddle beneath Frank’s boots flashed with white needle-frost, freezing into a sheet of brittle ice in less than two seconds.
Shen Shitou shivered wildly, his breath puffing into white mist.
“What’s this...?” Shitou gasped, his teeth chattering as he gripped his sledgehammer. “A demonic beast? A netherworld ice array?”
Frank stopped. He pulled a small brass heat gauge from his tool belt and held it out.
The red liquid column plunged past freezing, dropping straight down to minus twenty degrees.
“Heat drop of forty degrees in three yards,” Frank muttered, squinting through the mist. “Zero exhaust draft. High-pressure refrigeration leak. Someone left a commercial freezer wide open.”
Frank followed the creeping trail of frost around the back of the third manure silo.
There, wedged deep inside a mountain of frozen hay and rotting cedar chips, a small figure was curled into a tight ball.
It was a girl, barely fifteen years old, wrapped in shredded, mud-caked beggar silks. Her hair was coated in white rime, her lips were swollen and dark purple. The hay around her body was actively crystallizing into razor-sharp shards of black, glass-like nether-ice.
She was shivering so wildly that her teeth clicked like wooden dice in an ungreased cup.
Above her head, half-hidden by a frozen burlap sack, hung a torn magic charm depicting the royal crest of the Great Da-Qi Royal Dynasty.
Frank stepped onto the frozen hay, the dry straw crunching like sugar glass beneath his boots.
He knelt beside the shivering girl, extended his wooden carpenter’s ruler, and tapped her icy wrist.
Ping.
A violent blast wave of ice-slow chill traveled up the wooden ruler, freezing the lacquer into frost.
At the exact same instant, Frank’s internal HUD exploded with flashing crimson warning banners.
Frank stared at the floating crimson numbers, his eyes widening in pure builder disbelief.
“Fourteen thousand nine hundred and eighty PSI?” Frank breathed, his voice dripping with horrifying realization. “And they packed her in dry ice? Who in God’s name is running the clockwork upkeep on this kid?!”