The blinding sphere of viridian draconic star-fire lit up the jagged ruins of the Cloud-Mist Colosseum like an artificial emerald sun.
The intense heat wave had glass-fused the granite arena tiles within twenty paces into a bubbling, glass-smooth mirror that reflected the green apocalypse above.
Ten thousand spectators in the higher galleries shielded their eyes with silk sleeves, unable to gaze directly into the five-thousand-degree core of draconic energy.
In the history of the Bounded Cloud Prefecture, a berserk drake was considered an extinction-level local event.
Two hundred years ago, an immature Drake-Serpent had broken loose in the eastern foothills. He needed three Foundation Establishment elders and an entire legion of armored spearmen seven days to subdue. That left three villages reduced to charred charcoal.
Now, a Half-Step Rank Three beast was loose in the heart of the capital!
From fifty yards away, crouching behind the jagged stump of an overturned marble pillar, Crown Prince Chu Tianxiao was trembling with frantic malice.
His golden dragon robes were torn to shreds, his bruised jaw covered in ash. His fingers clawed wildly into the dirt.
“Let him die!” the Prince shrieked, his voice echoing off the stone tiers in a ragged falsetto. “He brought this upon himself! A lowborn peasant in blue canvas rags defying the Nine Dragons Death Cordon! Watch him be reduced to green soot! That will teach the mob what happens when common dogs disrespect royal power!”
Grand Instructor Song, clutching his singed topknot nearby, nodded wildly with wide, bloodshot eyes.
“Indeed! His Highness speaks with total truth!” Song echoed, wiping cold sweat from his neck. “No mortal flesh can withstand five thousand degrees of draconic star-fire! In one breath, his marrow will turn to steam. He will be fully erased from the mortal register! The Pavilion will purge his name from the records!”
On the upper gallery low roof walls, Grand Elder Yan and Elder Mo watched with trembling lips, their spiritual senses pushed to the total limit.
“Why does he not evade?” an examinee cried, gripping his hair in panic. “He has thirty feet of open ground behind him! Why does he stand there like a wooden statue?!”
“You don’t understand the Dao of a True Saint,” Elder Mo whispered. His ancient voice was heavy with philosophical respect. “When a mountain confronts the storm, it doesn’t dodge the rain. When a master confronts disaster, he doesn’t flinch before the fire. He stands at the center of the world, unmovable as the void itself.”
Down in the glass-lined crater, Frank stood fully still.
He wasn’t thinking about the Dao of a True Saint.
He wasn’t thinking about mountains or storms.
He was thinking about how much he hated bad preventative upkeep.
Frank slowly raised his left hand. His index finger pointed calmly toward the sky like an engineer checking wind speed on a high-steel framing job before authorizing a crane lift.
He didn’t chant an ancient sutra.
He didn’t burn a comms magic charm.
He simply tapped his temple with his yellow carpenter’s pencil, focusing his vision directly through the glowing green star-fire ball into the beast’s eye and skull anatomy.
Deep within Frank’s eye HUD, the DAO-QA screen surged into active test scan mode.
A lattice of pale amber scan lines swept downward across the forty-foot dragon-hound, slicing through scales, muscle tissue, muscle fibers, and spirit vein channels with clean, steady care.
Frank looked at the amber defect report floating in his vision, his eyebrows arching with deep skilled disapproval.
“Fourteen days of severe lower bowel impaction,” Frank muttered under his breath, shaking his head. “Look at that transverse colon. It’s backed up with dry, unhydrated nutrient pellets like concrete slurry left in a cement mixer over a three-day weekend. No fiber. Zero roughage. Complete stomach shutdown.”
In Frank’s experience, whether dealing with a clogged four-inch cast-iron sewer main or an organic living stomach tract, the underlying fluid dynamics were matching.
When solid waste can’t discharge, high-pressure backing-up pressure builds against the belly cavity, compressing the chest muscle and sending systemic pain signals through the chest nerve.
His eyes flickered to the second defect item on the report.
“And a full-grown leech-like mite living right on the tympanic membrane,” Frank continued in a low, deadpan murmur. “The poor beast has had a high-pitched drill screaming inside its eardrum twenty-four hours a day for six months. A high-hum clockwork shaking right against the hearing nerve induces acute sound trauma and manic psychosis. Any animal on Earth would lose its mind and try to tear down the walls under that kind of sense torment.”
He glanced at the third item. The jagged, unbending Cold-Iron collar cinched around the beast’s swollen neck.
“And they didn’t even chamfer the inside edge of the collar,” Frank noted with bitter disgust. “Raw, snapped steel edges digging into the neck-vein. Poor fabrication, zero upkeep, and criminal animal husbandry. The collar is choking neck-artery blood return by forty-two percent, causing severe brain hypoxia. If CIE-404 had a beast-doctor branch in this province, the Beast Taming Guild would be facing twenty counts of felony fault.”
Up on the watching low roof walls, the sight of Frank raising a single finger toward the heavens was saw through an entirely different lens of reality.
To the sect elders, exam guards, and high-tier fighters, Frank’s raised finger was not a casual hardware scan.
It was an impossible to understand divine mandate!
“Look at his left hand!” Grand Elder Yan gasped, his voice trembling with deep religious dread. “He raised a single finger toward the Vault of Heaven! He’s invoking the Ancient Scrying Mandate of the Ancients!”
“He’s peering directly into the beast’s soul!” Elder Mo gasped, gripping his silver sashes. “The scriptures state that only a Grandmaster of the Ninth Epoch can see the hidden tribulations of a dragon without burning his own sea of mind!”
“No defensive array! No protective runes!” another elder cried. “He stands bare before five thousand degrees of draconic wrath, weighing the beast’s condition upon his fingertip!”
In the eastern gallery, Shen Shitou watched with glowing respect. He held his demolition sledgehammer firmly against the granite flat stone slabs.
“Master has generated the Defect Punch-List,” Shitou declared solemnly to Princess Ling’er and Niu Mang. “Whenever the Master raises his hand to survey a ruined foundation, the load-bearing flaws can no longer hide from the light of truth.”
Ling’er nodded thoughtfully, checking her palm steam pressure gauge with quiet care. “The surrounding heat flux has steadied at fifty-two hundred degrees. Yet Master’s internal heat balance remains at total zero disturbance. His core is an infinite heat sink.”
Niu Mang swallowed his mouthful of roasted sweet potato and wiped his spade. “Master’s about to fix this dog. Reminds me of when the water clock broke in Hongwu Academy. Master stared at it for five seconds, tapped the gear with a screwdriver. It ran for three months.”
“Exactly,” Ling’er said softly. “The check phase must conclude before the hotfix is deployed.”
Down in the glass-lined arena pit, the Viridian Dragon-Hound’s patience reached its total, total zero.
The painful throbbing in its left ear, combined with the crushing pressure in its compacted bowels, overwhelmed the creature’s last shred of sanity.
The blinding sphere of viridian star-fire in its maw reached critical thickness.
VUUUUUUM—!
The green lightning arcing across its horns condensed into a solid halo of destructive force.
The beast didn’t merely breathe fire.
It lunged.
With the earth-shattering force of a collapsing castle wall, the forty-foot titan launched its entire twenty-eight-ton mass forward!
Its four-toed paws shattered the glass-fused glass floor beneath it into millions of razor-sharp green crystals that whistled through the air like shrapnel.
Its six-foot-wide draconic maw snapped downward, tracing a lethal, downward guillotine arc aimed squarely at Frank’s skull!
The speed of the strike was terrifying.
At twenty-eight tons moving at forty miles per hour, the shifted weight of air generated an empty pocket vortex that dragged loose boulders and shattered metal lockers toward the gaping jaws like debris sucked into a whirlpool.
The three nested rows of serrated, dagger-sized fangs gleamed with toxic emerald venom. It opened wide enough to swallow a horse and carriage whole.
The air pressure dropped by thirty percent in a split second. It pulled Frank’s denim jacket taut against his chest.
The air shrieking through the beast’s fangs produced a high-pitched sonic whistle that made the ears of spectators seventy yards away throb with pain.
The green shadow swallowed Frank whole, cutting off the light of the sky.
“IT’S OVER!” Grand Instructor Song shrieked in morbid glee.
“HEAVENS MERCY!” Hall Master Han wailed, covering his face in despair.
Crown Prince Chu Tianxiao leaned forward from behind his pillar, his eyes bulging with cruel excitement. He waited for the wet crunch of bones and the splatter of red across the sand.
Frank stood right in the center of the kill zone.
His right hand remained raised. His carpenter’s pencil remained behind his ear.
His denim jacket ruffled gently in the faster-than-sound suction vortex. But his feet were firmly planted on the solid mountain stone.
“Five frames of startup animation,” Frank noted with cold, cold and exact calm as the huge jaws dropped to within six inches of his forehead. “Massive telegraph on the downward bite. Zero lateral tracking. Classic hitbox desync.”
Frank’s weight shifted onto the outside edge of his left boot. His balance point dropped three tiny fractions of an inch into the earth as he prepared to slip the strike with tiny clearance.
Fifty thousand students gripped the stone railings in numbed horror, their knuckles bone-white, dozens already shutting their eyes to avoid the sight of red mist.
Not a single soul in the Grand Colosseum believed a mortal builder could survive a direct twenty-eight-ton sky guillotine strike.
Frank simply adjusted his stance. He tracked the dropping jawline with the calm scrutiny of a checker measuring straight-line variance on fresh sheetrock.
“Time to log the hotfix,” Frank murmured softly into the howling wind.