The silence that settled over Tongtian Apex was not the hush of an audience waiting for a speech.
It was the choking, holy quiet of five hundred thousand souls witnessing the closing of a cosmic epoch.
Yet in the shadowed rear corners of the spectator pavilion, several ancient hermit ancestors—men who had hidden in underground caves for three thousand years cultivating the Dao of Total Skepticism—clutched their jade fortune-telling bones, squinting through the golden light with desperate, bitter suspicion.
“There must be a flaw!” rasped Hermit Withered Pine, his yellowed fingernails digging into his cane. “No mortal construction project has ever achieved total perfection! A single missing nail, an unmortared joint, an unbalanced leyline... If there’s even one unresolved defect, the First Epoch charter mandates that the trial must be declared null and void!”
Across the terrace, Frank was sitting on an overturned five-gallon paint bucket behind the card table.
He had a pair of thin wire-rimmed reading glasses perched on the tip of his nose, a wooden rubber stamp in his right hand, and a square tin of red vermilion stamping ink open before him.
Carved across the face of the wooden stamp in crisp, raised rubber letters was a single line of text:
