The emerald glare streaming from Spirit-Wood Puppet #12 lit up the underground vault with eerie, blinding intensity.
Twin green beams pierced the darkness, casting long, wavering shadows across the rough granite walls.
The air within Ring Four began to hum with a high-voltage ringing hum that caused the hair on every examinee’s forearms to stand on end.
Grand Instructor Song stumbled back against the brass railing of the spectator gallery. His face was pale, but his sneer twisted into bitter mockery.
“Madness! Pure butchery!” Song shouted, his voice echoing shrilly through the cavernous vault. “Grand Elder Yan, look at what this barbarian has done! He struck the sacred old family relic with an iron bludgeon! He shoved black axle grease into its spiritual spirit veins!”
Song pointed an accusing finger at Frank’s grease-stained hands.
“The iron-puppet’s spirit core is overloading! In three breaths, the wood will splinter, the formation will collapse. He will be disqualified for destroying Pavilion property!”
Several high-born examinees nodded hastily, scrambling three steps back to avoid potential shrapnel.
“Indeed!” an examinee cried, clutching his silk robes. “No manual in the empire teaches that hitting an iron-puppet with an iron hammer constitutes pedagogical guidance! This is desecration of old family heritage!”
In the eastern gallery, Shen Shitou looked down at the screaming nobles with cold, plain pity.
“Fools,” Shitou muttered, resting his twenty-pound sledgehammer against his shoulder. “They think the spirit lives in the sky. Meanwhile, the Master knows the spirit lives in the load-bearing frame. If the frame binds, the soul suffocates.”
Princess Ling’er nodded thoughtfully, a small smile gracing her lips. “They mistake clockwork friction for spiritual pushback. When the Master removes the physical bottleneck, the spirit flows like water through a clean canal.”
Niu Mang took another bite of his cold sweet potato. “Master always says: if it squeaks, oil it. If it wobbles, hit it. Simple as that.”
Down in Ring Four, Frank showed zero sign of panic.
He casually wiped his greasy thumbs on his shop rag, tossed the rag over his shoulder. Then he walked up to the glowing wooden mannequin.
“Relax, everybody,” Frank muttered, shaking his head at the hysteria. “It’s not overloading. It’s idling.”
Frank reached out with two fingers and tapped the puppet’s freshly lubricated right elbow.
“Friction reduced by ninety-eight percent,” Frank observed calmly. “Leech-like drag removed. True motion posture achieved.”
He gave the wooden forearm a light, gentle nudge forward.
“Action is smooth now,” Frank said, stepping back three paces with hands on his hips. “Free movement unlocked. Go ahead and run your test cycle.”
That single, casual nudge was like unlocking the floodgates of an ancient sky dam.
Without the clockwork drag of dry bearings, binding gears, and silted joints, the surrounding spiritual energy circulating through the hardwood reached total zero flow pushback.
The iron-puppet didn’t shudder.
It didn’t creak.
It moved with the terrifying, liquid grace of an immortal swordsman stepping out of a thousand-year painting.
SHINNNNNG—!
The dull iron training sword strapped to the puppet’s hip was drawn in a single, barely noticeable flash of steel!
The sound was not the clatter of wood against iron, but the clean, ringing cry of a sky dragon greeting the dawn.
Before anyone could blink, the seven-foot wooden puppet blurred.
Not into two afterimages.
Not into four.
Eighteen distinct, emerald-edged silhouettes erupted across the sixty-foot width of Ring Four at the same time!
“What footwork is that?!” Grand Elder Yan gasped, clutching the stone railing so hard his fingernails dug into the stone.
The air in the underground vault fractured into a storm of razor-sharp wind blades.
The wooden iron-puppet carried out a set of movements that defied all human joint limitations: twisting, pirouetting. He leapt thirty feet into the air, and dropped with sweeping, amazing sword arcs.
Each strike traced an emerald arc of pure, condensed sword-intent through the air.
SWOOSH! SWOOSH! SWOOSH!
The emerald sword-light didn’t fade. It gathered in the center of the ring. It condensed into the coiled, majestic dark shape of an ancient horned dragon surging toward the heavens.
The legendary, long-lost sword technique of the First Epoch:
The Nine Dragons Sweeping the Void Sword!
“Impossible!” Grand Instructor Song shrieked, his knees buckling beneath him as he slid down the railing. “That technique... That technique was lost seven hundred years ago when the Imperial Sword Sect fell! How could an unranked puppet know the Nine Dragons sword?!”
In the center of the vault stood three massive granite testing pillars, each five feet thick and heavy with protective iron bands to absorb tester attacks.
The eighteen afterimages came together onto the three pillars in a single, timed together instant.
SCHLICK-SCHLICK!
A series of whisper-quiet, almost musical slicing sounds rippled through the stone chamber.
The wooden puppet landed silently on the granite floor, its wooden feet touching the rock without producing a single shaking.
It stood motionless for two seconds.
Then, with an elegant, flawless flourish of its wooden wrist, the iron-puppet slid the dull iron sword back into its wooden sword sheath.
CLINK.
The sword sheath lock clicked shut.
A breath of wind blew through the underground vault.
SLIDE... CRUMBLE...
The three five-foot-thick granite testing pillars suddenly slid apart.
Not into rubble.
Not into jagged chunks.
Each massive stone pillar separated into dozens of uniform, paper-thin stone discs—barely one tiny fraction of an inch thick—sliding off each other like a deck of freshly dealt playing cards!
SHSHSHSHSHSH!
Thousands of paper-thin stone slices cascaded across the floor in smooth ripples, fully uniform, their cut surfaces polished to a mirror sheen by pure sword-intent.
Grand Elder Yan stared in stunned silence, his hands trembling against the stone railing.
“Paper-thin granite cuts,” Elder Mo stammered, staring down from the dais. “Through five feet of heavy spirit-granite... Using a blunt iron training blade!”
“To impart such sword-intent into cold wood without speaking a single word...” another elder murmured in awe. “This is the legendary Spiritual Enlightenment of Inanimate Matter.”
Down in Ring Four, Frank walked over to the collapsed pile of stone slices, bent down. Then he picked up a circular granite wafer.
He held it up to the light, inspecting its thickness with a builder’s squint.
“One point a tiny fraction of an inch,” Frank muttered, nodding in mild test. “Consistent groove width. Blade wandered less than a tenth of a tiny fraction of an inch across the cut face. Good feed rate. The motor is tracking straight now.”
Frank tossed the stone wafer back onto the pile with a soft clatter.
He wiped his hands on his rag, pulled out a small wire brush. Then he cleaned a few stray metal shavings from the puppet’s bronze hip pipe rim.
“Tolerances are good,” Frank remarked. “If you guys ran a weekly upkeep checklist instead of burning expensive incense, you wouldn’t have testers burning out their spirit veins just to turn a gear.”
The seven-foot Spirit-Wood Puppet stood silently.
Its carved wooden chest sky-slit pulsed with warm, rhythmic emerald light, no longer glowing with violent fury, but with gentle, sentient warmth.
Slowly, deliberately, the wooden iron-puppet turned its head toward Frank.
Its jointed wooden fingers released the sword handle.
It took one step forward, sank onto its right knee. Then it bowed its carved wooden head until its forehead rested flat against Frank’s left work boot.
It raised both hands, offering the handle of its training sword upward in an ancient, total gesture of lifelong fealty from a creation to its divine master builder.
Up in the watching gallery, the exam guards and examinees leaned over the railing in stunned silence.
“The Autonomous Soul Bow...” Grand Elder Yan whispered, his voice trembling. “He didn’t merely guide the puppet... The wooden spirit recognizes him as its Creator Ancestor!”
Grand Instructor Song sat on the stone floor, his hands clutching his head.
“Creator Ancestor...” Song whimpered, his eyes hollow. “He awakened an ancient god with a crescent wrench...”
Frank looked down at the kneeling puppet, then down at his boot, and let out a weary sigh.
“Great,” Frank muttered, rubbing his forehead. “Now the furniture is bowing to me. Get up, puppet. You’re blocking the exit ramp.”
Frank looked up at the high dais where Grand Elder Yan and Elder Mo were still frozen against the railing.
“So,” Frank called out, his voice cutting through the stunned silence. “Did that meet your scoring rubric for movement fluidity? Or do I need to repack the wheel bearings on Ring Five too?”
Grand Elder Yan slowly rose to his feet, leaning heavily on the stone railing.
His sharp grey eyes trembled as he looked between the kneeling iron-puppet, the sliced granite pillars, and Frank’s casual, unimpressed stance.
“Chief Scribe,” Grand Elder Yan said in a choked, raspy whisper. “What... What does the official check scoring scroll mandate for such an exhibition?”
A trembling scribe in blue silk scurried forward, unrolling a twenty-foot parchment scroll with shaking hands.
“Grand Elder,” the scribe stammered, his eyes scanning the ink columns. “The highest score recorded in the history of the Automaton Guidance Trial is ninety-one points, achieved four hundred years ago by Patriarch Chen. But the regulations state that if an iron-puppet executes an old family heaven-tier sword technique, the score automatically defaults to... To one hundred points with honors!”
“One hundred points?!” Grand Instructor Song shrieked from the floor, clawing at his chest. “No! I object! This is a mockery of Master Teacher orthodoxy! A puppet can’t generate sword-intent without spiritual training! He cheated! He must have used a forbidden clockwork puppet magic charm!”
Song scrambled to his feet, his eyes bloodshot with desperate madness.
“Grand Elder Yan! You can’t allow this charlatan to walk away with a perfect score! If word spreads that an unranked country teacher passed the guidance trial using grease and an iron wrench, the prestige of our Capital Pavilion will be dragged through the mud!”
Grand Elder Yan’s expression darkened.
He stared at Frank, his fingers curling tightly inside his wide sleeves.
As the supreme power of the testing vault, Yan’s pride was at stake.
He had spent seventy years cultivating traditional master teacher techniques. To acknowledge that a youth in a denim coat had surpassed hundreds of years of spiritual sutras with simple clockwork shifts was unacceptable.
“Instructor Song speaks with too much agitation, yet his underlying caution is valid,” Grand Elder Yan declared coldly. He stepped toward the center of the dais. “The Dao of Teaching is in the end tested in the crucible of human combat! Iron-puppet guidance is but a test model!”
Yan raised his chin, his gaze boring into Frank like twin daggers.
“Teacher Lu Zhen! You claim your pedagogical methods are superior! Then let’s see if your mortal students can withstand the students of the Royal Capital!”