The high-pitched screech of straining brass echoed through the Heart of Innocence Trial Tower like fingernails scraping across a frozen copper kettle.
Eighty feet above the floor, the ancient Heart Inquiry Mirror wobbled wildly on its sky-steel spindle.
Its outer edge runes, carved from glowing starlight jade, flashed from calm silver to wild, strobing crimson.
A pungent stench of burning animal fat and scorched rune silk drifted downward. It smelled suspiciously like a dry, ungreased bronze bearing melting under heavy dynamic friction.
Grand Instructor Song pulled himself upright on his circular rush mat.
He brushed the sweat from his forehead with the edge of his satin sleeve, glaring at Frank’s limp, motionless figure propped against the far wall.
“Elder Mo! Exam guards of the Sacred Pavilion!” Song shouted, his voice echoing off the curved slate walls. “Look at him! He sits there unmoving, his eyes glazed, his body fully unresponsive!”
Song sneered, pointing a trembling finger at Frank with malicious delight.
“He hasn’t achieved the Primordial Void! That’s the stance of a man whose sea of mind has been fully devoured by the Mirror’s first inner demon!”
Several examinees who had barely passed the trial nodded eagerly.
“Master Song speaks the truth!” a noble youth piped up from the safe side of the chamber. “The boy was arrogant! He thought a country teacher could withstand the old family scrying array! His mind has collapsed into catatonia!”
Song puffed out his chest, adjusting his crimson collar with haughty pride.
“My seventy-eight-point Righteous Scholar Heart was hardened through thirty years of royal classics and clan devotion,” Song proclaimed. “A vulgar country handyman who eats apples during a sacred ritual deserves to have his soul wiped clean! Clear his carcass from the hall so we may proceed!”
On the high watching dais, Elder Mo didn’t call for the attendants.
His eyes remained fixed on the suspended mirror.
A 2-Star Master Teacher who had overseen this trial for over sixty years. Then, Elder Mo knew the symptoms of mental collapse.
A tester’s mind succumbed to the inner demons. Then, they cried, they screamed, they tore their hair out by the roots, or they bled from seven facial orifices.
They didn’t lean comfortably against the baseboards.
They didn’t emit soft, rhythmic, contentedly timed together snores.
Ding.
A faint chime rang inside Frank’s skull.
Frank blinked.
He rolled his shoulders back. He felt the satisfying pop of his upper spine bones realigning against the slate wall.
He let out a long, luxurious yawn, stretched both arms over his head. Then he scratched the back of his neck.
“Five minutes,” Frank murmured, glancing at the amber timestamp floating in his outer vision. “Just enough time to sort the hardware inventory. Glad I didn’t waste it watching that slideshow.”
The chamber went dead silent.
Grand Instructor Song froze, his triumphant sneer freezing into an ugly, twisted grimace.
“He... He woke up?!” Song stammered, stumbling backward onto his mat.
Frank stood up, dusted off the seat of his denim pants, and walked casually into the center of the chamber.
He looked up at the ceiling. There, the eight-foot black glass mirror was shaking like an off-balance front-loading washing machine on a high-speed spin cycle.
Thin trails of grey smoke were curling out from the brass world-size gear train housed above the mirror.
The projected cone of silver light had degraded into a sickly, flickering strobe that buzzed like a dying buzzing white tube.
Frank pulled his yellow carpenter’s pencil from his pocket, pointed it upward at the smoking relic, and frowned.
“Finished?” Frank called out toward the high watching platform. “Your projector is having a seizure. The framerate is dropping below fifteen frames per second, and you’re heat-throttling your core array.”
Elder Mo gripped the stone railing, leaning so far forward his white beard dangled over empty air. “What... What did you say?!”
“I said clean your optics,” Frank said flatly, his voice echoing off the stone walls. “You’re running an ancient focal array without cooling fins or fine dust straining. The focal lens is coated in eight hundred years of unburned incense resin. The brass bearings are dry-seizing. If you keep running it at maximum duty cycle, the housing is going to fracture.”
Grand Instructor Song scoffed loudly. “Nonsense! Defaming the Sacred Relic again! That’s the Heart Inquiry Mirror passed down from the founding ancestors! It has operated for eight hundred years without a single—”
Before Song could finish his sentence, the mirror’s internal gearwork reached its total limit.
For five nonstop minutes, the ancient spirit-hearing array had been attempting to calculate the numerical desire quotient of Frank’s soul.
Every mortal mind possessed measurable values: greed, wrath, pride, lust, fear. The array calculated these values using a multi-variable arithmetic matrix etched into ninety-nine starlight jade discs.
But Frank’s mind had been entirely offline.
Zero desire. Zero fear. Zero spiritual attachment.
In the exact logic of the ancient array, dividing mortal intent by total zero produced a non-terminating numerical paradox.
The spirit circuits overheated. The qi flow congested into a dead-end feedback loop.
CREAK-CREAK-CRACK!
High above, the brass housing swelled under sudden heat stress.
A hairline fracture spiderwebbed across the center of the eight-foot black glass disc.
Elder Mo’s eyes widened to the size of saucers. “The Ancestral Mirror! Stop the formation! Cut the spirit-stone supply!”
“Too late,” Frank said, stepping back two paces and crossing his arms. “Heat shock. Glass and cold air don’t mix when the core is cooking.”
KABOOM!
With an ear-splitting sonic crack like a lightning strike at point-blank range, the eight-foot Heart Inquiry Mirror exploded!
A blast wave of high-pressure silver light and crystal-clear shrapnel erupted from the ceiling.
“Heavens protect us!” Grand Instructor Song shrieked, diving face-first onto his rush mat and wrapping his silk robes over his head.
The exam guards on the dais threw up defensive qi shields. It turned aside the hail of black glass shards showering the chamber floor.
CLATTER-SHATTER-PING!
Thousands of glittering fragments of black glass and polished brass showered across the flat stone slabs, embedding themselves into the floorboards and slicing Song’s crimson silk robes into ribbons.
Frank didn’t even raise an arm.
The tiny star-fire spark residing in the center of his dantian pulsed faintly.
An invisible, quarter-inch boundary layer of tightly packed magnetic energy wrapped around his denim jacket, causing every incoming crystal shard to disintegrate into harmless grey soot two inches before touching his skin.
When the smoke cleared, the Heart of Innocence Trial Tower was in total ruins.
Eighty feet above, only a twisted, blackened brass armature hung from the ceiling, smoking pitifully.
The floor was blanketed in black glass dust and glittering crystal powder.
Grand Instructor Song slowly raised his head from the floor, his crimson robes shredded, a sharp piece of brass stuck horizontally through his topknot like a skewer.
“The mirror...” Song choked, tears of sheer panic welling in his eyes. “The eight-hundred-year-old Heart Inquiry Mirror... Is destroyed! He destroyed the Pavilion’s old family treasure! Execution! He must be drawn and quartered!”
On the western wall of the chamber stood the ancient Rune Tally Stone. A fifteen-foot slab of white jade that automatically recorded exam scores via underground spirit connections.
All eyes turned toward the tally stone.
The smooth jade surface flickered wildly with chaotic amber static.
Lines of ancient script blurred, scrambled, and rearranged themselves with wild speed, struggling to interpret the total exact collapse of the trial mirror.
Finally, the tally stone settled with a resounding, metal BONG.
Brilliant, blood-gold characters etched themselves deep into the white jade. It glowed with light so intense it lit up every corner of the darkened tower:
The silence that followed was total.
Not a single person breathed.
Even the wind whistling through the shattered ceiling dome seemed to freeze in mid-air.
Grand Instructor Song stared at the blood-gold text on the tally stone. His mouth opening and closed like a dying carp.
Transcendent Peak.
A rank that had not appeared on the tally stone since the founding patriarch of the Master Teacher Pavilion stepped into the heavens a thousand years ago.
Up on the watching dais, Elder Mo’s hand trembled so wildly that the priceless thousand-year mutton-fat jade teacup he was holding slipped from his fingers.
SMASH!
The teacup plunged eighty feet down, shattering against the black glass-strewn flat stone slabs in a spray of fragrant tea and white jade splinters.
Elder Mo didn’t even look at the broken cup.
He gripped the stone railing with both hands, staring down at Frank in shock.
“A heart so devoid of worldly attachment... That the mirror of the ancients couldn’t find a single anchor point...” Elder Mo whispered, his voice cracking. “The mirror didn’t explode from demonic interference. It exploded because the mortal plane can’t quantify the Primordial Void.”
The exam guards behind Elder Mo knelt in respectful silence. They stared at the lone figure below.
Frank looked down at the broken teacup near his boots, then looked up at Elder Mo. He rubbed his temples with deep annoyance.
“Look at this mess,” Frank muttered, shaking his head. “Broken glass, shattered brass, and an unshielded ceiling sky-slit. If it rains tonight, this whole room will flood. And now you’ve got tea stains on porous slate.”
Frank kicked a piece of twisted brass aside and walked toward the exit doors.
“Score is recorded. I passed. Where’s the next station? Let’s get through the clockwork testing before the trade guild lumber yards close for the day.”