The tension in the Grand Colosseum had reached a boiling, breathless pitch.
Two rounds. Two instant, brutal demolitions.
First, an earth-shattering trench spade had launched an agility prodigy into a fancy koi pond eighty feet away. Second, a polished brass posture pin had let loose a faster-than-sound steam needle that cleanly sliced a two-inch iron tower shield in half, shaving an iron-skinned berserker bald without breaking skin.
The ten thousand spectators were no longer laughing at the yellow gourd hard hats.
Frank’s students casually adjusted their rawhide chin straps. Each time, half the front-row bleachers flinched, instinctively bracing their hands against the stone railings for another load-bearing disaster.
“Who are these people?!” a merchant in the second tier whispered, clutching his fur collar. “A farm boy who inverts earth-shaking plates with a shovel. A delicate girl who cuts mountains with boiling tea water! What kind of forbidden martial school did Hongwu Academy dig up?!”
“Look at the western bench,” another elder muttered with deep unease. “Teacher Lu hasn’t even stood up once. He’s sitting there with his clipboard like a royal tax collector checking warehouse ledgers!”
GONGGGGGGGGGGG!
The Chief Judge struck the iron chime with a trembling hand, his voice echoing across the tense silence:
“The Grand Freshmen Tournament, Semi-Final Match! Class One versus Class Four-Hundred-and-Four!”
From the eastern team bench, Shen Lang strode into the arena ring.
Unlike the last contestants who entered with leaping somersaults or roaring war cries, Shen Lang moved with slow, hungry confidence. His eyes were locked onto Shen Shitou like a poisonous viper stalking a crippled sparrow.
At Shen Lang’s hip hung a sword sheath of white shark-skin, chased with exquisite silver filigree and pulsing with chilling blue light.
The old family heirloom of the Shen Clan: Frostbite, a Grade-2 High-Tier Spirit Sword forged from deep-ice-slow iron ore, worth more than three thousand spirit stones.
High above in the VIP box, Patriarch Shen watched Shen Lang enter the ring. His weathered hands gripped the dark wood stone railing with painful intensity. Five months ago, the clan had discarded Shitou to elevate Shen Lang as the undisputed heir. The elders of the Shen Clan leaned forward, their faces grim and expectant. To them, this was not just a tournament match. It was the violent crash of two cut branches of their lineage.
Down on the western bench, Shen Shitou slowly stood up.
His towering, broad-shouldered frame cast a heavy shadow over the wooden planks. He was wearing his clean brown linen work apron, his yellow gourd hard hat fastened securely under his square jaw. Resting across his broad shoulder was the twenty-pound forged iron sledgehammer.
Frank leaned back against the bench, tapping his pencil against the edge of his clipboard.
“Shitou,” Frank called out calmly.
“Here, Teacher.” Shitou paused, resting the iron hammer against his thigh.
“Check your boots first,” Frank said, pointing with his pencil. “Double knot tight? Good. Now look at the kid in the silk robe. He’s holding an unannealed high-carbon alloy. Look at the blade’s surface sheen under the morning sun. Notice how the blue glow has a rainbow refraction pattern along the fuller?”
Shitou squinted, studying the glowing blue sword with his sharpened Tier 2 senses. “Yes, Teacher. The crystal-forming along the spine looks uneven, like rapid cooling ripples.”
“Too much hardening without proper temper drawing,” Frank explained with a faint shake of his head. “They cooled it too rapidly to boost the superficial hardness rating on paper, leaving severe internal martensitic stress along the grain boundaries. It looks pretty and glows in the dark, but the impact toughness is complete garbage. A classic vendor marketing scam. Run a basic stress-relief test on it.”
“Understood, Teacher,” Shitou replied with a deep, solemn bow. “Stress-relief audit.”
Shitou turned and walked into the center of the ring.
His heavy work boots crunched against the granite dust, each step measured, deliberate, and ringing with the underground pulse of Mount Hongwu.
Thirty paces away, Shen Lang unsheathed his blade with an arrogant flick of his wrist.
SHINNNNNNNG.
A wave of bitter, biting frost rolled across the arena flat stone slabs. The moisture in the air instantly froze into sparkling ice needles as the Grade-2 Spirit Sword, Frostbite, drank deeply of Shen Lang’s Tier 2 Layer 1 spiritual Qi.
Shen Lang sneered, pointing the freezing tip straight at Shitou’s forehead.
“Long time no see, elder brother,” Shen Lang hissed, his voice dripping with poisonous amusement. “Five months ago, you lay in the old family courtyard coughing black blood, unable to lift a single cup of tea. Our grandfather threw you out like dead dog meat, where you belonged. I took your courtyard, your training chamber, and your old family sword.”
Shitou didn’t flinch. His broad, rugged face was as impassive as carved mountain granite. “The past is merely old mortar, Shen Lang. It has no bearing on today’s load-bearing plumb.”
“Hah! Still spouting gibberish like that deranged handyman behind you!” Shen Lang’s eyes flashed with cruel light. “You think wearing a dried squash on your head and carrying a blacksmith’s hammer makes you a fighter?! A cripple is a cripple! In our Shen Clan, only the chosen bloodline wields Frostbite! Today, I’ll sever your leftover tendons, break your ribs, and erase your name from our old family genealogy forever!”
Shen Lang stepped forward, his body blurring into a whirlwind of freezing blue mist.
“Die! Ninefold Glacial Sword Wave!”
WHOOOOOOSH!
Shen Lang swung his sword with all his might!
A huge, crescent-shaped blade of solid nether-ice—thirty feet wide and sharp enough to cleave an iron siege tower in two—erupted from Frostbite’s edge. The air heat plummeted to forty below zero as the ice-slow blade screeched across the flat stone slabs, kicking up a wall of frozen stone shards. It surged straight toward Shitou’s chest!
The spectators gasped in sheer horror!
“The Ninefold Glacial Sword Wave!”
“That’s a Tier-2 Peak area-of-effect technique! The frost intent alone will freeze his lungs solid!”
“Why isn’t Shitou dodging?! Why isn’t he swinging his hammer?!”
Shitou didn’t dodge.
He didn’t swing his twenty-pound sledgehammer. In fact, he casually planted the heavy hammer head onto the stone floor beside him, resting his right hand lightly on the hickory handle like an old workman leaning on a fence post.
Then, Shitou raised his bare left arm.
His sleeve was rolled up to the elbow. He exposed a forearm of thick, sun-darkened muscle, crisscrossed with faint silvery-gold striations.
Deep within his dantian, the vast, liquid ocean of Earth-Vein Qi ignited.
Because Frank had spent weeks purging every grain of hardened lime-scale from Shitou’s channels via high-intensity moving blast waves, Shitou’s twelve main spirit veins were no longer brittle mortal tissue. They had been remolded into seamless, dense, star-forged channels with a pulling strength exceeding load-bearing silver-steel!
Shitou opened his bare left hand.
He reached straight into the heart of the thirty-foot freezing ice-slow wave!
BOOM!
The ice wave struck Shitou’s palm.
To everyone’s utter disbelief, the thirty-foot crescent of ice-slow Qi didn’t freeze his flesh. The frost energy touched Shitou’s skin. Then, his internal Earth-Vein Qi grounded the heat shock instantly into the arena floor! The ice shattered into harmless, glittering powder, blowing past his shoulders like harmless snow!
And inside the scattering blizzard, Shen Lang’s cold-iron blade plunged forward with lethal thrusting driving force.
CLANG!
A sound like an iron anvil being struck echoed across the entire mountain peak.
Shen Lang’s eyes bugged out of his skull.
The razor-sharp, freezing edge of the Grade-2 Spirit Sword Frostbite was not buried in Shitou’s heart.
It was caught.
Shitou’s bare, calloused left hand had closed tightly around the middle of the glowing blue blade, his thick fingers clamping down like a two-ton high-pressure vice!
The freezing cold that could turn an ox to ice failed to penetrate even the first tiny fraction of an inch of Shitou’s skin. The blade sat motionless in his grip, trembling wildly under the locked moving torque.
“Y-You...” Shen Lang stammered, pulling wildly on the handle with both hands. “You caught Frostbite with your bare hand?! Impossible! That’s an old family Grade-2 Divine Weapon!”
Shitou looked down at the blade trapped in his fist, his voice flat and calm.
“Too much hardness,” Shitou quoted Frank’s exact words, his golden eyes narrowing. “Zero impact toughness. Internal martensitic stress along the crystal lattice. Defective product.”
Shitou gave a gentle twist of his wrist.
CRUNCH!
An ear-splitting, metal screech tore through the arena.
The three-foot, priceless old family Grade-2 Spirit Sword, Frostbite—cherished for four ages by the Shen Clan—didn’t merely snap in two.
Under the crushing twisting shear of Shitou’s silver-steel-heavy grip, the brittle, untempered cold-steel shattered into thousands of tiny, sparkling fragments!
Metal glitter and jagged shards of blue steel rained down onto the flat stone slabs. It bounced off Shitou’s heavy work boots like broken glass.
All that remained in Shen Lang’s hands was an empty, useless shark-skin handle with three inches of jagged, ruined steel sticking out of the crossguard.
Shen Lang stood frozen in place, staring at the empty handle in his trembling fingers.
His mind went fully blank. His worldview, his arrogance, his noble heritage, and his entire martial foundation collapsed in a single, devastating heartbeat.
“M-My sword...” Shen Lang choked out, tears of psychological horror spilling down his pale cheeks. “Our clan’s old family sword... Shattered... Like peanut brittle?!”
He looked up into Shitou’s calm, unblinking eyes, stumbling backward in raw, primal terror:
“What kind of monster are you?!”
High in the VIP box, Patriarch Shen slumped back into his seat, his face as white as a corpse.
“The Star-Forged Silver-steel Pipes...” the old patriarch cried in an agonized whisper. “He crushed a Grade-2 spirit sword with five fingers... He didn’t just wake up the bloodline... He has evolved into an Ancient Martial God!”
Down in the ring, Shitou brushed the glittering steel dust from his palm onto his canvas apron. He stepped forward with his twenty-pound sledgehammer.
“Your equipment audit failed, Shen Lang,” Shitou said coldly. “Now, it’s time for load-bearing demolition.”