The Viridian Dragon-Hound’s neck tendons coiled like massive hemp thick ship rope cables under huge clockwork tension.
To the beast tamers watching from the royal gallery, the creature’s temporary freeze was merely the winding of a lethal spring.
“He touches the Great Cranial Spirit vein barehanded!” an elder shrieked, tearing wildly at his gray beard. “The dragon fire surging through its main neck blood vessel will burn up his flesh to gray ash in half an instant!”
“Madness! Suicidal arrogance!” Chief Elder Wu cried, coughing a spray of blood into his sleeve as he struggled to rise from the rubble. “Even a Foundation Establishment specialist needs three layers of dragon-scale gauntlets to approach an agitated Rank-2 Peak apex hunting beast!”
High above the wreckage, Crown Prince Chu Tianxiao watched with cold, poisonous delight.
“Let him burn,” Tianxiao whispered, an evil grin spreading across his face as he leaned over the gold-trimmed railing. “A vagrant carpenter playing with a royal war-beast. When his arm melts into sizzling animal fat, let’s see if he still lectures royal nobility on sound deep ring!”
Around the outer rim of the tiered arena, tens of thousands of students shielded their eyes, bracing for the blinding blast of sky star-fire that would surely reduce the young mortal to glowing embers.
Inside the glass-fused glass crater, the heat spiked once more.
The Viridian Dragon-Hound let out a deep-throated hiss that sounded like molten metal poured wildly over dry ice.
Its huge neck swung sideways, intending to use its four-ton skull as a demolition wrecking ball to grind the insolent mortal into pulp against the granite outer edge wall.
Frank didn’t budge an inch.
He didn’t channel defensive astral Qi. He didn’t pull out protective magic charms or retreat behind Shen Shitou’s iron sledgehammer.
Instead, his thumb shifted a tiny fraction of an inch deeper into the soft depression beneath the dragon’s time crest.
Right where the chest nerve trunk bifurcated around the internal ear canal.
In the building world of high-pressure upkeep, when a pump began cavitating wildly due to an air bubble trapped in the return line. It pounded the steel housing with a sledgehammer only cracked the casing.
What a seasoned millwright did was locate the relief valve, depress the bleeder pin. Then it let air pressure restore smooth-flowing flow.
Living systems were no different.
Animals didn’t suffer psychotic berserk episodes because they harbored ancient malevolence toward humanity.
They suffered berserk episodes. That was because their central nervous systems were receiving screaming error interrupts they had no physical gearwork to clear.
Frank leaned his shoulder forward, using his forearm as a natural cantilever against the beast’s massive jaw hinge.
He applied an exact, tuned crushing force of four point two pounds directly onto the swollen nerve cluster.
“Hold still, dog,” Frank said, his voice as flat and dry as unprimed white chalk-stone board. “You’ve got bugs in your ears.”
The screen in his field of view flared with immediate test feedback:
Frank’s thumb pressed into the nerve bundle. Then, an extraordinary phenomenon unfolded across the arena floor.
The ferocious, world-ending emerald aura wrapping the dragon-hound’s body didn’t shatter under an opposing blast of spiritual force.
It stuttered.
Zzzzt—flump.
Deep within the beast’s throat, the roaring fire of five-thousand-degree star-fire choked.
The blinding sphere of viridian hellfire that had threatened to melt the entire lower colosseum vanished with a sound like a wet candle being snuffed between two fingers.
Puff.
A single wisp of pale white steam drifted lazily out of the beast’s nostrils. It smelled faintly of sulfur and singed hair.
The crackling emerald arcs of lightning that had danced between its brow horns flickered once, twice. Then he dissolved into harmless static.
The monstrous neck muscles, which had been rigid enough to deflect giant crossbow bolts, softened like warm baker’s dough.
The beast’s huge jaw, wedged six feet deep into the arena bedrock, went fully slack.
Across the four quadrants of the Grand Colosseum, fifty thousand fighters felt their minds screech to a grinding halt.
The silence that dropped upon the arena was so deep that the flutter of royal silk banners on the distant roof sounded like rolling thunder.
Grand Elder Yan gripped the marble railing so hard his fingernails dug deep into the polished stone.
“The... The Dragon-Flame Fire... Was snuffed out?” Yan croaked, his eyes wide and vacant. “With a single finger? Without a spiritual magic chant? Without even the light of a seal?”
“That was no mortal touch!” Hall Master Han whispered, falling to his knees on the dust-covered flat stone slabs. “That was the Ancient Soul-Sealing Finger of the Northern Heavenly Monarchs!”
“He didn’t combat the dragon’s wrath with violence!” another senior elder gasped. “He saw the flow of energy within the beast’s spirit veins! By touching the Gate of Hundred Convergences, he cut the connection to the cosmic fire!”
“Supreme Divine Harmony!” a chorus of pavilion instructors echoed in disbelief. “He silenced a disaster with a few ounces of pressure!”
On the royal terrace, Crown Prince Chu Tianxiao’s mouth hung open so wide his golden coronet tilted precariously over his brow.
“Impossible...” Tianxiao stammered, his fingers trembling wildly against the handle of his ritual sword. “That beast tore apart six Star-Forged Cold-Iron chains! It slaughtered four hundred royal wyverns during the Northern Border Conquest! How could it stop because a peasant pinched its neck?!”
Trembling with rage and humiliation, the Crown Prince grabbed the golden horn once more, lifting it to his lips: “Beast! Obey the Royal Bloodline! Tear that peasant to ribbons!”
He blew a wild, wavering blast on the royal horn.
The brassy note echoed over the silent arena, sharp and grating.
Down in the pit, the Viridian Dragon-Hound merely twitched its left earlobe beneath Frank’s hand, let out an irritated snort from its leathery nostrils. Then he fully ignored the royal summons.
A collective intake of breath swept through the nobility.
The sacred royal war-beast, bound to the royal dynasty by blood oaths and ancient rites, treated the Crown Prince’s command like an annoying fly buzzing over a dung heap.
Behind Tianxiao, the royal guards lowered their axe-spears in dazed stupor, unable to process the total collapse of royal prestige.
In the eastern gallery, Princess Jiang Ling’er held her breath. She watched her master’s hand with laser-like focus.
“The chest reflex,” Ling’er whispered softly, her fingers flying as she made rapid shorthand notes in her clockwork ledger. “By stimulating the skull baroreceptors, Master triggered an immediate parasympathetic cascade. Blood pressure down sixty-eight percent. Sympathetic rage loop forcibly ended.”
Shen Shitou nodded with deep, rock-steady gravity.
“When a stone saw begins screeching and throwing sparks, you don’t throw water on the blade,” Shitou declared to the stunned inner students around them. “You cut the drive belt at the pulley. Master cut the beast’s drive belt.”
Niu Mang leaned comfortably against the cart, chewing his sweet potato with steady contentment.
“Told you. Master knows where all the squeaks come from. Back on the river wharf, whenever the ox wouldn’t haul timber because horseflies got in its mane, Master just pinched its ear like that. Ox went right to sleep, and we got sixty logs moved before noon.”
Several older students nearby stared at Niu Mang with sheer, blank veneration.
“To compare a Rank-2 Peak Draconic Disaster to a logging ox...” a student gasped, clutching his head. “Such boundless Dao-heart! Such terrifying martial nonchalance! Truly, the students of the Master see all creatures beneath heaven as mere components of a divine blueprint!”
Down in the pit, Frank didn’t release his grip.
His thumb remained planted firmly on the soft depression behind the hound’s ear. He felt the violent, uneven pulsing of the skull artery gradually slow to a steady, rhythmic thrum.
Underneath the thick green scales, Frank could feel the foreign body. The tiny fraction of an inch-wide parasite wriggling wildly in the inner ear canal, its tiny jaws shaking at high-pitched frequencies that had driven the beast mad for six months.
To Frank, the situation was painfully familiar.
It reminded him of an old junkyard mastiff named Buster back in Chicago, owned by a sloppy scrap-metal dealer who never cleaned the kennel, fed the poor dog rotten hot dogs, and wondered why the animal bit through every chain link in sight.
“Yeah, that tick is chewing you raw, isn’t it?” Frank murmured softly, using his left hand to gently rub the base of the dragon’s left horn. “Nobody cleaned your ears, nobody brushed your coat. They fed you dry pellets until your guts locked up solid.”
The beast’s huge, four-ton skull didn’t pull away.
Instead, a massive, shuddering tremor began at the base of the dragon-hound’s skull.
Shiver—
The tremor rippled down its neck like a wave traveling through heavy chainmail.
It cascaded through its massive chest, down its muscular flanks, and along its forty-foot armored spine all the way to the tip of its barbed tail.
The beast’s massive ribs swelled in a huge, shuddering breath in.
Then, with a painful groan that shook through the granite floorboards, the Viridian Dragon-Hound exhaled.
A blast of warm, non-lethal air washed over Frank. He carried the smell of wet earth and crushed river stones.
The beast’s eyes, which had burned with blind, psychotic crimson fury for the past hour, underwent a staggering transformation.
The crimson veins spider-webbing across its white of the eye rapidly pulled back.
The pinpoint pupils swelled, softening into two huge pools of glowing jade green.
The terrifying gaze of a bloodthirsty ancient horror vanished.
In its place was the confused, exhausted, profoundly relieved look of a giant farm dog that had just had an iron spike removed from its paw.
The dragon-hound let out a low canine whimper that drifted through the silent tiered arena.
Fifty thousand fighters stared with dropped jaws as the forty-foot dragon bowed its huge head, resting its scaly chin flat against the crushed arena sand directly at Frank’s work boots.
Its massive tail, tipped with razor-sharp bony spikes that could shear an ox cart in two, gave a tentative, cautious, two-inch wag.
Thump.
The sound of the tail striking the sand sounded like a muffled bass drum.
Frank took his hand off the beast’s neck and dusted his jeans with a soft sigh.
“Good boy,” Frank muttered. “Now don’t move. We’ve got a lot of upkeep to catch up on.”