The word BEGIN had barely left the Chief Judge’s lips when the air blew up with shrieking wind.
Zhou Tian blurred into high-speed motion.
A storm of razor-sharp jade soft glow swirled across the ring as his twin aerolite scimitars spun into blinding nested arcs. His body dissolved into dozens of overlapping wind afterimages, dancing across the flat stone slabs like leaves caught in a mountain gale.
“The 108 Phantom Wind Blades!” a Class 3 elder cheered from the high bleachers, clapping his hands in proud celebration. “Young Master Zhou has fused the ancient gale footwork with his innate wind spiritual root! In our entire third division, no one can match his agility! You can’t strike what isn’t there!”
In the central VIP box, Vice-Principal Lu leaned back against his stitched silk cushions with an arrogant, satisfied sneer. “A classic agility mismatch. That clumsy ox won’t even realize his hamstrings have been sliced open until his knees hit the dirt. What a farce.”
In the center of the ring, Zhou Tian’s mocking voice echoed from eight directions at once. It bounced off the arena walls:
“Where are you looking, dirt-digger?! Behind you? To your left? Above your yellow squash?! You can’t touch the wind with a rusty manure shovel! Kneel and beg for mercy!”
Down on the western team bench, Frank cracked a salted melon seed between his front teeth with a sharp pop. He spit the shell into a small wooden box and glanced at his clipboard without lifting his head.
“Soil compaction test,” Frank muttered under his breath, his voice perfectly calm. “Hit the seam at the four o’clock joint, Niu Mang. The sub-base is fully loose. Clear the void.”
Niu Mang heard his teacher’s order clearly through the howling gale.
He didn’t look left. He didn’t look right. He didn’t waste a single calorie trying to track the thirty swirling wind phantoms darting around his periphery. In Frank’s classroom, chasing sight illusions was an amateur error that got you demoted to sweeping sawdust.
Niu Mang simply took a deep, measured breath.
His heavy chest swelled, his brown canvas work apron stretching tight across his barrel torso. His Tier 2 Layer 1 liquid Qi—dense, bronze, and heavy as molten copper—surged down his spinal column straight into his thick thigh muscles and calves.
He dropped his balance point by six inches, widening his stance into the rock-steady stance of a commercial high-pressure digging rig.
With a fluid, practiced motion he had repeated ten thousand times in the western quarry drainage trenches, Niu Mang slammed the square nose of his iron spade straight into the mortar seam between two eight-inch granite slabs.
CLINK.
The hardened edge bit two inches into the joint.
Then, Niu Mang raised his right leg, locked his knee. Then he brought his heavy work boot crashing down onto the spade’s forged shoulder.
[Post-Hole Drive]!
BOOM!
It wasn’t a traditional martial arts technique. There were no soaring dragons, no crying phoenixes, and no poetic sky verses.
It was eight thousand pounds of focused moving high-pressure force passed through a tiny edge into loose sub-base aggregate!
The instant Niu Mang’s boot struck the spade shoulder, the entire arena floor buckled.
An underground sound blast wave raced outward through the granite strata in a blinding ripple. The loose gravel and loose dirt beneath the flat stone slabs underwent instant dynamic liquefaction, the trapped air voids collapsing in a heartbeat!
The eighty square yards of solid stone floor beneath Zhou Tian suddenly melted like churning sea water!
“What?!”
Zhou Tian’s graceful, ghostly wind-steps found zero pushback.
His front foot came down expecting solid mountain granite. And instead struck a flat stone slab that pivoted wildly like a see-saw over an empty air pocket!
His moving driving force instantly jammed. His delicate wind-barrier shattered against the ground-shaking rebound.
Before Zhou Tian could even understand what had happened, the three-ton granite slab beneath his boots kicked upward with the force of a steam catapult!
BAMMMMMMM!
“GYAAAAAAAH!”
A blood-curdling shriek pierced the sky.
Zhou Tian didn’t just lose his footing. He was launched horizontally into the stratosphere, his twin scimitars flying from his hands in sparkling parabolas.
Higher and higher he soared—past the ten-foot arena walls, past the twenty-foot guard castle walls, and past the thirty-foot VIP balcony!
Elders in the high stands watched with slack-jawed horror as Zhou Tian flew through the crisp mountain air like a kicked sack of grain, arms and legs flailing in wild panic:
“SAVE MEEEEE—!”
SPLASHHHHHHHHH!
Eighty feet away, situated in the academy’s outer courtyard garden, sat the fancy “Nine Lotus Koi Fountain.”
Zhou Tian plunged headfirst into four feet of icy pond water. It sent a forty-foot geyser of water, duckweed, and scared goldfish spraying across the decorative rockery. His silk robes ballooned, his leather boots sticking straight up into the air like two ugly reeds.
Silence.
Dead, total, choking silence gripped the ten thousand spectators in the Grand Colosseum.
Not a single person breathed.
The Class 3 teachers sat frozen in their seats, their teacups suspended halfway to their mouths. Their faces turned the color of ash.
Vice-Principal Lu’s jaw hung open so wide his lower lip nearly touched his collar, his eyes bulging in total disbelief.
Over by the decorative garden, five panic-stricken academy medical students rushed toward the pond with long bamboo poles, wildly trying to fish the sputtering prodigy out of the mud. Several golden koi fish flopped weakly on Zhou Tian’s unconscious face.
The Chief Judge stood in the center of the ring, his hand still raised from signaling the start of the match. He blinked once. He blinked twice. He looked down at the arena floor. There, a single, neat eight-inch trench hole was visible beneath Niu Mang’s spade. Then looked far over the outer castle walls where pond water was still trickling down the marble statues.
The entire match had lasted exactly 1.2 seconds.
One stomp.
One shovel.
Total airborne eviction.
Niu Mang wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead with the back of his canvas sleeve. He pulled his spade from the crack, inspected the iron blade for edge rolling. Then he gave a satisfied grunt.
“Edge is clean,” Niu Mang said to himself, shouldering the spade. “Teacher’s instructions were right. That joint was full of soft dirt.”
He turned on his heel and walked calmly back toward the western team bench, his yellow gourd helmet bobbing in the bright sunlight.
High in the central VIP box, Patriarch Shen stood up from his dark wood chair. He gripped the stone railing so hard the polished wood groaned and cracked.
“One strike...” Patriarch Shen whispered, his voice trembling with gut-deep dread. “He didn’t even use a weapon art! He used pure underground ground-shaking deep ring to invert the earth’s gravity vector! Where did Lu Zhen find such an earth-shattering monster?!”
Down on the western bench, Frank pulled his brass pencil from behind his ear. Then he made a neat black checkmark next to Niu Mang’s name on his clipboard.
“Match duration: one point two seconds,” Frank remarked in a quiet, dry tone. “Acceptable energy transfer. But you over-pierced by half an inch, Niu Mang. You drove the spade through the leveling sand and nicked the underlying shale. That adds unnecessary wear to the spade’s edge.”
Niu Mang bowed his yellow gourd head in deep shame. “Student was clumsy! I failed to account for the shale’s shear pushback! I beg Teacher to punish me!”
“Just sharpen the blade with the whetstone before lunch,” Frank said, tossing him a gray silicon hardened carbon-iron stone. “Sit down and drink your barley tea.”
“Yes, Teacher!”
Across the arena, the Chief Judge finally recovered his voice. Swallowing a mouthful of dry spit, he banged the ivory mallet against the iron chime with a trembling hand:
GONGGGGGGGGGGG!
“R-Round One... Winner: Class Four-Hundred-and-Four! Advance to Elimination Round Two!”
A delayed, chaotic roar erupted from the ten thousand spectators!
“Did you see that?!”
“He kicked a three-ton granite slab into the sky with a shovel?!”
“That wasn’t a sword match, that was an earthquake!”
“Who’s that farm boy?! Is he a hidden demon beast in human skin?!”
The Head Teacher of Class 3 jumped to his feet, red-faced with anger, pointing an accusing finger at the western bench: “Foul! That’s demolition sabotage! That boy hidden an earth-attribute earthquake magic charm inside that shovel! Dean Shang, we demand an equipment check!”
Dean Shang looked down from the high judging platform, his eyes blazing with cold contempt. “Silence, Teacher Wu! Every elder on this platform witnessed the strike. The student used zero talismanic parchment and zero forbidden pills. He used pure, pure physical leverage and Tier Two foundational Qi! The victory is total!”
The Class 3 teacher slumped back into his chair, humiliated and speechless.
In the Class 2 staging area, a tall, imposing youth with skin like burnished dark bronze slowly rose from his bench. His arms were as thick as tree trunks, covered in jagged battle scars, and his eyes burned with savage ferocity.
Zhao Gang. The “Iron-Skin Berserker” of Class 2. A Tier 2 Layer 1 titan whose body had been forged in boiling healing vats of spirit-iron for seven long years.
Zhao Gang gripped a massive, six-foot iron tower shield in his left hand and a spiked war flail in his right. He sneered, spitting onto the stone.
“A cheap earth trick,” Zhao Gang growled, his voice shaking like grinding millstones. “The farm boy got lucky against a bird who couldn’t plant his feet. But in Round Two, they face me. My Iron-Bovine defense can’t be moved by shovels or earthquakes!”
Zhao Gang looked across the arena toward the western bench, his eyes narrowing onto the slender, delicate girl in the brown linen apron.
“Class 404 is sending out a little girl with a sewing needle?” Zhao Gang scoffed, smashing his spiked flail against his iron shield with an ear-splitting CLANG. “I’ll crush her into meat paste before she takes three steps!”