Mid-air, suspended at the apex of his lethal descent, Zhao Feng was smiling.
It was the cold, practiced smirk of a royal prodigy who had envisioned the exact bloody flight path of his triumph.
His twin Thousand-Year Wind-Ripping Daggers whistled through the air, cross-locked into a sweeping scissor strike aimed directly at the farm boy’s neck tendons.
In Zhao Feng’s mind, the match was already over.
The clumsy bumpkin in the canvas apron hadn’t even raised his arms. He had simply driven his digging spade into the stone floor like a dull-witted gardener planting leeks.
“Kneel in blood, country dog!” Zhao Feng screamed, pouring every drop of his Peak Qi Sea training into his forward moving vector.
His forward speed surged past forty miles per hour.
His balance point was pitched aggressively forward at forty degrees, relying entirely on his left silk slipper to plant against the stone and provide the lateral pivot point for his execution stroke.
Down on the floor, Niu Mang didn’t blink.
He didn’t look at the flashing daggers. He didn’t look at Zhao Feng’s snarling face.
He simply followed Frank’s instructions with the unquestioning, bovine obedience of a master heavy-equipment worker.
Niu Mang’s massive arms bent.
With fifty thousand pounds of raw, Primal Bull leverage, Niu Mang heaved backward on the ash-wood handle of his hard dark metal spade.
CRACK-LEVER!
The sharp hard dark metal spade head, wedged deep beneath the granite spreading joint, acted as a class-one lever.
The two-foot-wide, four-inch-thick granite floor tile popped out of its mortar bed.
It didn’t shatter.
It rose cleanly, hinged on its rear edge, propping itself upward at a precise twelve-degree angle.
The protruding front lip of the granite tile stood exactly one and three-quarter inches above floor grade.
And it stood directly in the landing path of Zhao Feng’s dropping left foot.
In the world of high-speed civil physics, a height differential of one and three-quarter inches is classified as an unflagged total trip hazard.
At forty miles per hour, it’s an execution sentence.
Zhao Feng’s downward-pointing left toe. He was wrapped in soft, stitched silk with zero protective reinforcement, struck the raised granite lip.
THWACK.
The soft silk toe entered the recessed gap beneath the lifted tile.
The granite lip caught the instep of Zhao Feng’s foot like a steel bear trap.
Zhao Feng’s forward driving force didn’t stop.
The law of moving heavy rush doesn’t care about royal lineages.
It doesn’t care about ninety-character wind mantras.
It doesn’t care that Zhao Feng was the nephew of a royal minister.
One hundred and sixty pounds of human flesh and bone. He traveled forward at sixty feet per second, suddenly found its bottom anchor point pinned to total, unbending zero.
The results were exactly spectacular.
Zhao Feng’s eyes bulged so hard the blood vessels in his whites burst into crimson webs.
“Guh—?!”
That was the only sound Zhao Feng managed to emit.
His entire body wildly pivoted around his trapped toe like an unbalanced flywheel snapping its drive shaft.
His knees whipped forward. His hips vaulted upward. His torso rotated into a violent, wind-cutting spiral.
WHOOSH-FLIP-SPIN!
Zhao Feng carried out a breathtaking, reflex seven-hundred-and-twenty-degree level corkscrew in mid-air!
His twin Thousand-Year Wind-Ripping Daggers flew out of his numbed grip.
THWACK! THWACK!
The two old family daggers shot sixty feet straight up into the vaulted ceiling, burying themselves handle-deep into the underground granite like throwing knives into butter.
Meanwhile, Zhao Feng completed his second mid-air rotation and began the landing phase.
He didn’t land on his feet.
He didn’t land on his hands.
Zhao Feng landed squarely, symmetrically, and hydrodynamically on his face.
KABLAMMMMMM!
The sound of Zhao Feng’s forehead and cheekbones impacting the polished granite floor was like a frozen ham being dropped from a third-story balcony onto a sidewalk.
The striking force was huge.
Zhao Feng didn’t just hit the floor.
He skidded.
Propelled by forty miles per hour of unspent forward heavy rush, Zhao Feng slid thirty-five yards across the testing vault on his nose, cheekbones, and belt buckle!
SCREEEEEECH—!
The polished granite floor acted like coarse eighty-grit sandpaper.
Zhao Feng’s stitched azure silk robes tore into ragged ribbons.
He left behind a long, glistening, unbroken streak of crimson blood, skin oil, and crushed silk across thirty yards of clean royal floor.
His skid finally came to a halt when his head struck the copper boundary support post of Ring Eight with a hollow, ringing chime.
DONG.
Zhao Feng lay fully motionless, twisted into a pretzel-like configuration of limbs, his nose flattened entirely sideways, his mouth agape, and both eyes rolled back into his skull.
A single loose incisor tooth spun across the flat stone slabs, clattering to a halt at Grand Instructor Song’s boots.
The entire Underground Testing Vault dropped into a silence so deep that the dripping of water from a distant ceiling crack sounded like cannon fire.
Sixty high-born examinees stood frozen on the gallery stairs, their silk fans hovering motionless in the air.
Grand Elder Yan’s jaw dropped open. His grey beard dangled limp against his chest.
Grand Instructor Song looked down at the bloody tooth resting beside his satin shoe.
His face turned the color of curdled goat milk. His knees buckled, and he leaned against the gallery wall, his mouth opening and closing soundlessly.
“Zhao... Zhao Feng...” Song choked, his chest heaving. “The number one swordsman of the junior academy... Defeated without a single clash of weapons?!”
Song turned to Grand Elder Yan with pleading, desperate eyes. “Elder Yan! This can’t count! The farm boy didn’t execute a recognized martial stance! He didn’t channel sword-energy! He committed sabotage on the testing arena floor!”
“Silence, Song!” Grand Elder Yan hissed, his voice trembling with cold sweat. “Do you take me for an idiot? A fighter who can’t see an uneven flat stone slab during a high-speed lunge has no right to call himself a master of footwork!”
Two Pavilion medical attendants carrying a wicker stretcher stumbled into the ring, their faces white as sheets.
They knelt beside the unconscious prodigy, checking his pulse with trembling fingers.
“Skull blast!” an attendant stammered in horror. “cheekbone fractured in three places! Nasal septum fully crushed! His Sea of Qi is intact, but his balance center has been scrambled into porridge!”
Down in Ring Four, Frank stepped forward with his hands in his denim pockets.
He stopped beside the lifted granite tile, tapped his temple with his yellow pencil. Then he examined the site of the incident with the cold, detached professionalism of an CIE-404 safety investigator.
His eyes pulsed amber as his internal HUD generated an official event log:
Frank looked at the amber readout, then looked at the thirty-yard smear of blood across the floor. Then he shook his head.
“Told him,” Frank muttered, clicking his tongue in mild disgust. “Silk slippers on polished stone. Zero lateral ankle support. Pitching his balance point forty degrees forward into an uninspected zone.”
Frank looked toward the watching platform, his voice echoing flatly across the silent vault.
“That’s a CIE-404 recordable incident. Any unflagged height change over a quarter of an inch needs safety cones and bright outer edge tape. The kid sprinted blind into a shift seam. He’s lucky his skull didn’t crack like a watermelon.”
In the center of the ring, Niu Mang pulled his spade out of the joint.
With a gentle tap of the flat blade, Niu Mang knocked the raised granite tile back into its mortar bed.
Clack.
The tile settled flush with the surrounding floor, perfectly level once more.
Niu Mang wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his sleeve.
He reached into his canvas apron pocket, carefully unwrapped the leftover half of his steamed sweet potato. Then he took a massive, happy bite.
Munch. Munch. Munch.
The sound of Niu Mang chewing his sweet potato echoed through the cavernous vault like thunderclaps in the quiet hall.
“Good potato,” Niu Mang mumbled around a mouthful of orange starch. “Still warm.”
Up in the eastern spectator box, Shen Shitou folded his arms over his twenty-pound sledgehammer. He nodded with total religious conviction.
“See the supreme Dao of the Master,” Shitou whispered to Princess Ling’er. His voice was heavy with solemn pride. “The arrogant royal falcon soared through the nine heavens, boasting of wind and storm. Yet before the unbending foundation of the earth, he was brought low by a single grain of dust.”
Ling’er sighed with quiet awe, her violet eyes shining. “Master didn’t even need Mang to strike the boy. The boy’s own pride was the hammer that shattered his face against the rock. This is the realm of ‘Defeating the Ten Thousand without Raising a Finger’!”
On the dais, Grand Elder Yan finally found his voice. Even so, it sounded like dry leaves scraping across a gravestone.
“One... One move...” Yan whispered, clutching his chest. “No... It wasn’t even a move! The boy merely rested his shovel on the ground!”
“Grand Elder...” Elder Mo whispered, his voice trembling with respectful dread. “This isn’t simple strength. Teacher Lu analyzed Zhao Feng’s footwork down to the hairsbreadth. He foresaw the exact flight path, the exact landing tile. The exact split second of vulnerability. This is the legendary Omniscient Eye of the Heavens!”
Grand Elder Yan swallowed hard, cold sweat drenching his silver undergarments.
Every high-born tester in the gallery was trembling in their silk robes.
Zhao Feng was the undisputed prodigy of the capital! A genius who had defeated dozens of seasoned instructors!
And he had been reduced to a thirty-yard skid mark by a farm boy who hadn’t even dropped his lunch!
Frank looked up at the dais. He waved his yellow carpenter’s pencil toward the unconscious Zhao Feng as the attendants carried him away on the stretcher.
“Hey! Exam guards!” Frank called out. “Make sure you mop down that floor with bleach. Blood is a living hazard. And somebody get me my exam scorecard. We’ve been in this basement for two hours. The wholesale lumber yards are going to close before I get my permits stamped.”