The Underground Testing Vault of the Master Teacher Pavilion smelled of damp cedar, brass filings, and stale incense.
Located sixty feet below the grand marble lobby, the cavernous chamber was carved directly from solid underground granite.
Twelve circular dueling rings lined the floor, each delineated by copper inlay bands driven into the rock.
Inside each ring stood a seven-foot-tall mannequin carved from hardwood. It was bound with bronze bands and fitted with jointed limbs.
These were the legendary 1-Star Spirit-Wood Puppets. Ancient training automatons built during the First Epoch to evaluate a teacher’s pedagogical signal ability.
Elder Mo led the surviving examinees down the stone spiral stairs. His face still was pale from the total destruction of the Heart Hearing Mirror.
Flanking him was Grand Elder Yan, a hawk-nosed old man with sharp grey eyebrows and a high bronze crown, who had been summoned from his secluded training chamber after the alarm sounded.
In the spectator gallery near the eastern stairs, Frank’s three students leaned against the iron stone railing.
Shen Shitou rested his twenty-pound sledgehammer across his knees. He watched the wooden mannequins with intense, analytical focus.
“The second trial evaluates pedagogical signal,” Grand Elder Yan announced, his voice grating like grinding stone. “A Master Teacher doesn’t merely possess a pure heart. He must possess the sacred capability to impart his understanding to others.”
Yan pointed his long finger toward the nearest wooden mannequin.
“These Spirit-Wood Puppets possess zero independent intellect,” Yan continued. “Their cores are blank slate matrices carved from Thousand-Year Ironwood. Testers must project their spiritual mind, recite the Great Sage Imparting Sutra, and guide the iron-puppet to execute a recognized combat form.”
Yan’s cold eyes flickered toward Frank, lingering on his denim jacket.
“Scoring is based on movement fluidity, moving power. The martial rank of the technique carried out. Grand Instructor Song, step forward and show the standard of the capital!”
Grand Instructor Song stepped into the first dueling ring with a dramatic flourish of his crimson robes.
His hair was still slightly singed and his satin sleeves were torn. Even so, he had regained his arrogant swagger.
“Students and peers, observe closely,” Song declared loudly, turning to the surrounding examinees. “Imparting martial understanding needs total mental harmony. Only through thirty-six cycles of the Nine-Sun Harmonizing Mantra can one wake up the dormant wooden spirit veins!”
Song sat cross-legged on the granite ring, ten paces from the wooden puppet.
He closed his eyes, formed the Dual Lotus hand seal, and began chanting in a high, nasal drone.
“By the radiant warmth of the Nine Suns, let the wood drink the morning dew...”
Ten minutes passed.
Twenty minutes passed.
Sweat poured down Song’s cheeks. His crimson robes grew soaked with sweat as he channeled his spiritual qi into the puppet’s chest core.
Finally, after thirty-five grueling minutes of non-stop chanting, the wooden puppet shuddered.
CREAK... GRIND... SQUEAK.
With the painful, jerky shudder of a rusted hand-crank well, the puppet raised its right arm four inches.
Its wooden fingers clamped clumsily around the handle of a dull iron training sword.
It took two stiff, staggering steps forward, swung the blade downward in a crooked, shuddering arc. Then it struck a granite testing block with a dull thump.
The stone chipped slightly.
Grand Instructor Song slumped backward onto his palms. He gasped for breath, his lips blue from spiritual tiredness.
Grand Elder Yan nodded in mild test.
“A rudimentary execution of the Sunset Willow Sword,” Yan noted, nodding to the scribes. “Movement fluidity: twenty-four points. Moving strike: thirty points. Overall score: fifty-four points. A passing test.”
Song wiped his forehead, breathing heavily, but a smirk returned to his lips. “Fifty-four points on a cold hardwood iron-puppet is an honorable showing! Now let’s see how the country handyman fares!”
Grand Elder Yan turned toward Frank. “Tester Lu Zhen. Enter Ring Four.”
Frank stepped through the copper inlay band into Ring Four, hands in his pockets.
He stopped three feet in front of Spirit-Wood Puppet #12.
The iron-puppet stood seven feet tall, built from dense, dark brown hardwood. Its joints were connected by cast-bronze pivot pins. Its chest plate featured a circular glass sky-slit revealing a faintly pulsing spirit core.
Frank tilted his head, inspecting the wooden figure with a builder’s cold, merciless eye.
He reached out his right hand, gripped the puppet’s right wrist, and gave it a gentle wiggle.
SCRAPE-GRIND.
The joint barely moved a tiny fraction of an inch, emitting a dry, metal-on-wood screech that made Frank’s teeth hurt.
Frank tapped his temple with his yellow pencil. His eyes pulsed amber.
Frank looked at the amber box, let out a deep, exhausted sigh, and shook his head.
“Unbelievable,” Frank said aloud. “This isn’t an iron-puppet. It’s a seized farm tractor.”
Grand Elder Yan’s brow furrowed with growing impatience. “Tester Lu Zhen! Cease your muttering and start the Great Sage Imparting Sutra! You have forty-five minutes to project your mind into the spirit core!”
Frank didn’t sit down.
He didn’t form lotus seals.
He didn’t chant a single word about the morning dew or the Nine Suns.
Instead, Frank reached into his leather tool pouch. Then he pulled out an eight-inch chrome-vanadium crescent wrench, a small tin of dark grey molybdenum disulfide grease, and a brass-headed deadblow hammer.
He wiped the grease tin with an oily rag, took off his denim jacket, tossed it over the copper boundary support post. Then he rolled up his shirt sleeves.
The exam guards on the watching platform froze.
Grand Elder Yan stared in utter, paralyzing confusion.
“What... What’s he doing?” Grand Instructor Song scoffed, pointing wildly. “Where are his mantras?! Where is his soul projection?! Why is he holding a plumber’s wrench?!”
“Is he... Going to assault the Sacred Iron-puppet?!” a scribe cried in alarm.
Up in the gallery, Shen Shitou smiled knowingly, elbowing Niu Mang. “Look, Junior Brother. Master is applying the Divine Unbinding Protocol. When the outside shell is seized, no spirit can circulate through the vessel.”
Ling’er nodded in breathless admiration. “To force a spirit through a choked vessel is the folly of mediocre teachers. The Master cleanses the physical channels before awakening the soul.”
Down in Ring Four, Frank stepped behind the wooden mannequin, tapped the brass casing on its upper chest spine with his wrench. Then he inspected the hex-head bolt holding the neck pivot together.
“Four tiny fractions of an inch of axial play,” Frank muttered, shaking his head. “Whoever assembled this shoulder assembly didn’t use a lock washer. The edge gear is binding against the housing every time the armature tries to rotate.”
Frank fitted the jaws of the crescent wrench over the chest bone hex-nut.
He adjusted the knurled thumb screw on the wrench with his thumb until the jaws clamped flush against the brass flats.
Click.
With a smooth, practiced twist of his forearm, Frank applied forty foot-pounds of torque.
CREAK-SNAP.
The seized brass bolt shifted three-quarters of a turn, settling the internal edge gears into perfect mesh.
Frank reached around to the puppet’s right shoulder socket, pulled open the small leather check flap. Then he scooped a dollop of thick grey molybdenum grease on his index finger.
He shoved his finger directly into the dry brass ball-bearing race, working the grease into the packed bearings with vigorous, rhythmic circles.
“No lubrication in forty years,” Frank grumbled, wiping his greasy hands on his rag. “Linseed oil dried out into sticky varnish. The balls were skidding instead of rolling. That’s why your idiot teacher had to chant for forty minutes just to get the arm to lift four inches.”
Grand Instructor Song’s face turned bright scarlet. “You dare insult my training technique?! You’re defiling a sacred ancient object with foul animal grease!”
Frank ignored him entirely.
He dropped to one knee beside the puppet’s right leg.
He inspected the knee joint. It was packed solid with fine granite dust from three hundred years of testing chamber debris.
Frank picked up his brass deadblow hammer.
He gauged the angle of the pelvic gimbal. He set his left boot against the puppet’s ankle to brace the assembly. Then he raised the hammer.
WHACK!
The deadblow hammer struck the puppet’s lateral hip pivot with a clean, ringing blast wave.
CRACK!
A solid plug of compacted grey grit and dried resin dislodged from the knee socket, clattering across the stone floor like gravel.
The pelvic gimbal snapped back into true plumb posture with a clean, metal THUNK.
Frank stood up, dusted off his knees, and grabbed the puppet’s wooden sword arm.
He lifted it.
The arm swung upward without a whisper of friction, gliding smoothly through the air.
Frank nodded with skilled satisfaction.
“Zero stiction. Full outward clearance. Backlash removed,” Frank said, tucking his crescent wrench back into his belt loop. “Mechanics are sound. Now the motor doesn’t have to fight fifty pounds of leech-like drag.”
Before Frank could even step back, a sudden change occurred within the wooden mannequin.
Deep within the puppet’s chest, the Thirteenth-Century Ironwood Spirit Core had been designed to circulate surrounding spiritual qi through carved internal grain channels.
For three hundred years, those channels had been choked by friction, binding gears, and seized bearings.
Now, with every clockwork bottleneck eradicated and every pivot bathed in high-grade molybdenum lubricant, the internal qi breath flow achieved zero flow pushback.
The qi didn’t trickle.
It blew up.
VUUUUUUM—!
The dull glass sky-slit in the puppet’s chest flared with brilliant, emerald-green sky fire!
Two emerald beams of light erupted from the iron-puppet’s carved wooden eye sockets, piercing sixty feet through the testing vault and scorching twin black holes into the granite ceiling!
Grand Elder Yan stumbled backward, his bronze crown knocked askew as he gripped his chest in disbelief.
“The... The Autonomous Soul Starting?!” Yan shrieked, his voice cracking into a high falsetto. “He didn’t chant! He didn’t impart a scripture! He awakened the puppet’s dormant Heavenly Dao Bone with an iron bar?!”