The Body Tempering Testing Ring was built from thick slabs of polished white granite, enclosed by heavy brass railings to keep onlookers at a safe distance.
In the center of the ring, a youth the size of a prize breeding ox was kneeling on all fours, sobbing bitterly into the stone.
He was barely seventeen years old, clad in rough hemp trousers patched with burlap at the knees. His broad back was bare, crisscrossed with furious crimson welts where heavy canes had broken the skin.
At his knees lay the shattered leftovers of an eight-inch sphere of crystal-clear quartz, its glowing core leaking useless wisps of spiritual vapor.
Standing over him was Chief Proctor Zhao, brandishing a five-foot punishment rod crafted from iron-tipped mountain bamboo.
“Insolent brute!” Zhao screamed, bringing the cane down across the boy’s shoulders with a brutal CRACK. “You worthless peasant dog! This Five-Hundred-Stone Testing Quartz was imported directly from the Capital! You were instructed to gently channel your inner breath using the ‘Floating Mist Crane Palm’!”
“I... I tried, Elder!” the boy cried, his deep voice trembling like an earthquake. “I tried to flutter my fingers like the crane... But my hands are too thick! When I touched the glass, it just... It popped!”
“Popped?!” Zhao shrieked, raising the cane high above his head, channeling his Tier 1 Layer 8 aura into the iron tip. “You crushed it with vulgar muscle! Since your family can’t pay five hundred spirit stones, I’ll shatter your kneecaps and sell your marrow!”
Zhao snarled, swinging the rod in a vicious arc directly toward the boy’s neck.
Around the ring, hundreds of high-born spectators watched with cold calm distance or cruel smirks.
CLINK.
The expected sound of shattering bone never came.
Instead, a sharp, metal chime rang out through the arena—the crisp, ringing tone of high-pulling tool steel striking cold iron.
Proctor Zhao’s entire right arm jolted wildly. A wave of bone-jarring shaking shot up his radius, traveled through his elbow. Then it wrenched his shoulder joint with such intense torque that his fingers snapped open.
The heavy bamboo cane spun out of his grip, clattering harmlessly against the granite floor.
Zhao stumbled backward three paces, clutching his throbbing wrist. “Who dares—?!”
Standing between Zhao and the crying farm youth was Frank.
In his right hand, Frank held a twelve-inch carpenter’s framing square forged from solid blue-hardened steel. He had held the corner at a precise forty-five-degree bending angle, neutralizing five thousand pounds of dropping moving impact by redirecting the force through his heels into the bedrock.
Frank was squinting at the ruler markings on his framing square, checking the edge for nicks.
“Good steel,” Frank muttered approvingly. “Zero edge warping. High twisting stiffness.”
Behind Frank, Shen Shitou stepped into the ring, his twenty-pound sledgehammer resting across his shoulder like a siege ram, while Jiang Ling’er hovered near the ropes wrapped in her shop blanket.
“Lu Zhen?!” Zhao roared, recognizing the disgraced teacher’s plain robes. “Have you lost your mind?! You dare interfere with the Punishment Hall?!”
“Interfere?” Frank asked, turning his head slowly. “You’re trying to execute a worker because you used the wrong tooling for the material specification.”
Zhao’s mouth fell open. “What nonsense are you spouting?!”
“Look at this kid,” Frank pointed the tip of his framing square at the kneeling farm boy.
Frank’s HUD flickered to life, projecting a glowing neon grid across the young man’s massive frame.
Frank shook his head in weary frustration.
“Pelvic width: forty-four inches,” Frank rattled off. “Thigh bone thickness: three point four times standard baseline. His tendon attachments have the pulling strength of three-quarter-inch braided tow-cables. The boy was built by nature to dig foundation footings through solid granite.”
Frank turned to face Zhao, his eyes cold and flat.
“And you,” Frank said, “asked him to do the ‘Floating Mist Crane Palm.’ You told a forty-ton tracked bulldozer to put on pink satin slippers and perform Swan Lake on a pane of decorative window glass. And when his natural high-pressure torque crushed your cheap quartz ornament, you blamed the machine.”
A stunned silence blanketed the arena.
None understood words like bulldozer or pirouette, but every fighter in the pavilion saw the terrifying physical reality. Frank had blocked Chief Proctor Zhao’s full-strength, Tier 1 Layer 8 strike using an unranked piece of angled iron, without channeling a single wisp of spiritual qi!
Proctor Zhao’s face burned with humiliation. “He’s an illiterate ox-herder! He can’t understand the subtle, poetic grace of the Heavenly Dao!”
“The Heavenly Dao doesn’t care about poetry,” Frank said. “The Heavenly Dao cares about physics. Mass times gaining speed equals force. Work equals force times distance. You don’t need poetry to move dirt. You need leverage.”
Frank walked over to the wooden railing. There, a rusty hard dark metal-iron trench spade was leaning against an upkeep wheelbarrow.
It was a standard groundskeeper’s spade. A three-foot ash-wood shaft fitted into a broad iron blade caked in dried topsoil.
Frank picked it up, inspected the weld with his thumb, and walked back to the weeping farm boy.
“What’s your name, kid?” Frank asked.
The boy sniffled, wiping tears across his massive forearm. “Niu... Niu Mang, Master. My father herds oxen in the Southern Hills.”
“Stand up, Niu Mang,” Frank commanded. “Crying is an inefficient use of electrolytes.”
Niu Mang scrambled to his feet. He stood at full height. He was nearly six feet four inches of solid muscle, towering over both Frank and the exam guards like a walking mountain of clay and iron.
Frank shoved the ash handle of the trench spade into Niu Mang’s massive palms.
“Hold this,” Frank instructed. “Right hand on the upper grip, left hand eight inches down the shaft. Drop your balance point three inches. Widen your stance. Stop fluttering your elbows like a sick duck. Drive your left heel into the bedrock.”
Niu Mang’s huge hands instinctively wrapped around the worn wood.
The moment his fingers clamped around the ash handle, something extraordinary happened.
The clumsy heaviness that had caused seven academies to reject him vanished in a split second.
The shovel was not a weapon of delicate sword-forms. It was a tool of leverage, of earth, of raw downward thrust and clockwork advantage.
His massive shoulder girdle locked into sharp-angled posture with his hips. Deep within his chest, his dormant bloodline—the ancient pulse of the Primal Bull—felt the sacred weight of an implement built to tear open the crust of the world!
RUUUUUUUMBLE...
A low, underground shaking hummed through the granite floorboards beneath Niu Mang’s bare feet. Dust danced in tiny circular ripples.
Niu Mang looked down at the rusty shovel in childlike awe.
“Master...” Niu Mang whispered. “The ground... The ground feels soft. Like I could dig a trench all the way to the Western Sea.”
“You could dig a trench through their office building if you engaged your lats,” Frank said deadpan. “Shovel kinematics: torque equals force times distance. When you strike, you don’t use your arms. You drop your body weight onto the footpeg and let gravity do sixty percent of the work.”
Niu Mang stared at Frank with tears streaming down his cheeks. Seven masters had called him a brainless beast fit only for slaughter. This master had given him a shovel and explained how to move the world.
THUD!
Niu Mang fell to both knees. He held the trench spade horizontally above his head like an emperor receiving a mandate from heaven.
“Disciple Niu Mang...” the boy roared, slamming his forehead against the stone, “begs Master Lu to accept me! I’ll dig whatever Master commands! I’ll flatten mountains for Master!”
Frank pulled out his third yellow registration slip from his pouch.
“Sign line four, Niu Mang. And stop cracking the tiles; the academy will bill me for the stonework.”
Niu Mang pressed his massive, dirt-caked thumb onto the charcoal ink, stamping his print across the parchment.
A warm deep ring chimed inside Frank’s chest as the micro-star-fire spark pulsed with renewed balance.
“Three students,” Frank muttered, tucking the slips into his leather belt. “Full apprentice crew. One ironworker, one boiler tech, one heavy digging worker. Now we can start pulling building permits.”
“Hold your tongue, Lu Zhen!”
A freezing voice cut through the pavilion like a poisoned blade.
The crowd parted instantly as an elderly man in lavish purple scholar robes strode into the ring. It was flanked by six senior Elders of the Academic Committee.
It was Vice-Principal Lu Xun.
Lu’s narrow eyes swept across Frank’s three students: Shen Shitou clutching a sledgehammer. Jiang Ling’er shivering in a burlap sack. And Niu Mang kneeling with a farm shovel.
A sneer of deep disgust twisted Lu’s thin lips.
“Do you believe you have outsmarted the Academic Senate, Lu Zhen? Enrolling three crippled rejects, beggars, and illiterate laborers doesn’t satisfy our academic standards!”
Lu raised a gold-sealed scroll, unfurling it before the assembly.
“By emergency decree of the Vice-Principal’s office, a teacher on probation must prove pedagogical competence! In exactly forty-eight hours, the Punishment Board will conduct an official Competency Audit on Classroom 404!”
Lu stepped forward, whispering with a cruel smile: “If your three ‘students’ can’t show a traditional training breakthrough during the audit, Classroom 404 will be demolished, your teaching license burned. You’ll spend the rest of your life breaking limestone in the southern quarry! We leave!”
The elders and spectators chuckled, following Lu out of the pavilion.
Frank watched them leave, fully calm. He pulled out his pocket watch.
“Two-fifteen,” Frank said calmly. “Forty-eight hours. Plenty of time to fix the roof, hang the doors, and run a clockwork overhaul on three apprentices.”
Frank turned to Shitou, Ling’er, and Niu Mang.
“Grab your tools, kids,” Frank commanded, heading toward the mountain trail. “Shift starts now. Today’s first lesson is job-site prep and trash clearing.”