The silence that dropped upon the Cloud-Mist Colosseum was thick, choking, and total.
Fifty thousand spectators in the distant upper galleries clutched the stone railings, their knuckles white, their breath caught in their throats.
Down in the scorched sand pit, thirty paces from the northern tunnel, an ordinary mortal youth in a blue canvas denim jacket stood motionless.
Ten paces directly in front of him loomed the forty-foot mountain of green scales, jagged black glass spikes, and ancient slaughter intent.
The Viridian Dragon-Hound towered over Frank like an ancient temple pillar over a field mouse.
Its draconic chest, armor-plated in linked six-sided scales, heaved with ragged, rhythmic breaths that blew clouds of white-hot, rotten-egg vapor over Frank’s work boots.
From seventy yards away in the rubble, Hall Master Han pulled himself up on one elbow, his voice cracking with sheer, desperate hysteria.
“Run! Run, you fool!” Han screamed, coughing up flecks of black blood into the ash. “It’s not an ordinary beast! It’s charging its Viridian Dragon-Plasma Breath! Five thousand degrees of sky draconic fire! You’ll be boiled away into carbon before your ashes touch the ground!”
Chief Elder Wu covered his eyes against the broken stonework. “Madness... Pure mortal madness! He has offered his life to the beast’s jaws! In three breaths, not even a tooth will remain of him!”
In the high ruins of the Royal Balcony, Crown Prince Chu Tianxiao watched from behind his overturned stone pillar, a poisonous, trembling grin spreading across his soot-stained face.
“Die, arrogant peasant,” Chu Tianxiao hissed under his breath, clutching his bruised ribs. “Let the dragon turn your insolent carcass into a puddle of burnt fat! That’s the price for insulting the royal bloodline! When you’re dead, I’ll execute your three laborers and claim your cart!”
Among the upper tiers, students from various capital academies began whispering wild prayers, covering their faces with their silk sleeves.
“May Heaven preserve his soul,” an academy scholar whispered, his hands trembling. “To face a dragon’s breath without armor is suicide!”
“He has no fear because he has no understanding!” another scholar scoffed bitterly. “A country laborer knows nothing of the five elements or ancient fire! His ignorance is his tomb!”
Frank didn’t run.
He didn’t draw a weapon.
He didn’t even take his hands out of his denim jacket pockets.
Instead, Frank tilted his head slightly, squinting at the huge beast with the cold, test calm distance of a veteran clockwork builder inspecting a high-pressure commercial boiler on the verge of a total rupture.
His yellow carpenter’s pencil remained resting comfortably behind his right ear.
“Look at this poor bastard,” Frank murmured under his breath. He shook his head with genuine, skilled sympathy. “Every living system follows standard plumbing and heat-powered laws. If you don’t vent the pressure, the vessel blows its seals.”
Frank had spent twenty years inspecting steam boilers, hydronic radiators, and high-pressure ammonia chillers.
When internal heat increases without a spreading tank or an ASME-approved spring-loaded relief valve, the pressure curve follows an exponential flight path toward total casing rupture.
Living vessels were no different.
The beast’s chest cavity was expanding far past its volume yield limit. That forced unburned body-energy gases into its pharyngeal pouch at dangerous speed.
Frank’s eyes flickered across the beast’s anatomy, systematically cataloging its physical state down to the tiny fraction of an inch.
The beast’s left ear was pinned fully flat against its skull. It shook at an unnatural, high-hum sound stutter.
Its left eye was squinted shut. It was surrounded by inflamed, swollen red tissue leaking clear fluid-draining fluid from intense nearby fever.
Its massive hindquarters were trembling with reflex neuromuscular tremors, unable to bear full weight on the left stifle joint due to spinal nerve squeezing.
And most tellingly, its lower belly—the ventral region directly beneath the ribs—was distended, rock-hard, and visibly bulging like an over-inflated high-pressure air-powered tank.
“Severe lower colon impaction,” Frank diagnosed calmly. “Two weeks of compacted dry pellets without water. An ear parasite drilling directly into the skull sound nerve. And an unchamfered cold-iron collar cinched so tight it’s choking the neck-vein return by forty percent.”
Frank clicked his tongue in deep disgust at the Beast Guild’s fault.
“If someone bolted an unpadded iron band around my windpipe, drilled a screw into my ear, and backed up my plumbing for fourteen days, I’d bite through the furniture and burn down the building too. The animal isn’t evil. It’s just fully neglected.”
Frank tapped his temple with his index finger. His internal HUD flared with pale amber diagnostics:
Frank looked at the floating report, nodded slowly, and took half a step forward.
Up on the spectator galleries, that single, casual forward step sent blast waves of impossible to understand awe through fifty thousand onlookers.
To the high-tier fighters, the sect elders, and the grandmasters of the capital, Frank’s relaxed, upright stance was not the foolishness of an ignorant mortal.
It was the terrifying, rock-steady poise of an Ancient Celestial Sovereign.
“He... He stepped closer?!” an elder of the Azure Sword Sect whispered, his fingernails digging into his palms until blood seeped. “He stands within ten paces of an Ancient Disaster with his hands tucked into his clothes!”
“Look at his gaze!” a patriarch cried in respectful terror. “No fear! No panic! No defensive qi barrier! He regards the beast not as a monster of doom, but as an unruly hound in his private courtyard!”
“Could it be... The legendary Sovereign Stare of the Heavens?!” Grand Elder Yan gasped from his high low roof wall, his ancient heart pounding against his ribs. “The scriptures of the First Epoch record that when the Ancient Sages walked the mortal realm, ancient beasts would lower their heads in trembling submission before their boundless presence!”
In the eastern gallery, Shen Shitou rested his twenty-pound sledgehammer against his collarbone. He watched his Master with total religious certitude.
“Master has assumed the Posture of Total Power,” Shitou whispered to Princess Ling’er. “When a structure is leaning crooked, the Master doesn’t plead with the wood. He stares down the grain until it yields to the weighted drop-line.”
Ling’er nodded, her violet eyes gleaming with quiet pride. “The beast senses the infinite depth within Master’s dantian. A bonfire doesn’t dare challenge the sun.”
Niu Mang took another bite of his cold sweet potato. “Master always stares like that right before he tells someone their foundation footings are out of square. That dog is about to get inspected, and there are no exemptions on job safety.”
Down in the arena, the Viridian Dragon-Hound was not looking at Frank’s clothes.
It was looking into Frank’s eyes.
For six months, every human this beast had met had carried iron chains, barbed whips, and screaming royal banners.
Every human had looked at it with either trembling, pathetic terror or cruel, arrogant greed.
But this human’s eyes held neither.
This human was looking at its inflamed left ear with the calm, analytical concern of someone checking a squeaking door hinge.
Yet the agony burning inside the beast’s skull was too huge to be quelled by curiosity alone.
The a deep hum sonic wave from Crown Prince Chu Tianxiao’s war-horn had driven the leech-like nether-ear mite into a wild feeding frenzy, releasing neurotoxins directly into the beast’s skull lower brain.
The hound’s blood-red eyes flared with blinding madness.
GURRRRRRRR...
Deep within the beast’s throat, a terrifying transformation occurred.
A blinding sphere of emerald star-fire ignited in its pharyngeal chamber!
The heat around the beast’s maw skyrocketed to five thousand two hundred degrees!
The air warped and fractured into violent sight mirages.
The ancient granite flat stone slabs beneath the beast’s chin didn’t merely crack—they melted, liquifying into bubbling pools of semi-clear emerald glass!
The blast wave of blasting heat pushed outward like an invisible battering ram, stripping the paint off the broken lockers and burning to ash wooden splinter debris forty yards away into instant grey ash.
Frank felt the heat wash over his face.
His hair fluttered slightly in the white-hot heat updraft. But his denim jacket remained perfectly intact, shielded by the tiny, 10,000-Degrees of star-heat star-fire core spinning serenely within his dantian.
To an ordinary mortal, five thousand degrees was instant vaporization.
To Frank’s internal core, which burned at ten thousand Degrees of star-heat wrapped in eight layers of magnetic holding coils, the dragon’s five-thousand-degree star-fire was barely a lukewarm bath.
The heat slope actually flowed inward, his dantian absorbing the excess blasting heat and converting it into clean, tightly packed magnetic steadying energy with zero effort.
The Dragon-Hound arched its massive neck, drawing in a massive lungful of air through its burning nostrils.
Its jaw unlocked, unhinging like a python’s mouth, revealing three nested rings of razor-sharp fangs.
The blinding sphere of viridian star-fire swelled to the size of a carriage wheel, crackling with arcs of green lightning, primed to unleash a thousand-foot cone of world-ending incineration directly down Frank’s throat!
A high-pitched invisible whine shrieked through the air. That created a nearby empty pocket that dragged loose pebbles toward the beast’s glowing maw.
The sheer sound pressure shattered the stone tiles around Frank’s boots into grey dust.
Fifty thousand spectators closed their eyes, convinced that the young teacher was about to be wiped from existence.
Hall Master Han squeezed his eyes shut, screaming in agony: “IT’S FIRING! HEAVENS SAVE HIS SOUL!”
Crown Prince Chu Tianxiao let out a frantic cackle: “Turn to steam, peasant! Turn into ash!”
Frank didn’t flinch.
He didn’t blink.
He simply took his right hand out of his jacket pocket, curved his thumb and forefinger into a precise clockwork measuring tongs grip. Then he leaned his weight slightly onto his left work boot.
“Heat relief valve maneuver,” Frank muttered softly. His eyes tracked the micro-movements of the beast’s neck tendons. “Let’s vent the boiler before you blow the metal tube head.”