The joyous celebration of the Viridian Dragon-Hound lasted for exactly twelve seconds.
The huge beast was midway through an enthusiastic, ground-shivering tail wag when its entire forty-foot frame suddenly seized.
Its front legs locked straight. Its jade spine bowed upward into a taut, painful arch.
Its jaw dropped open in a silent, choking grimace.
GURRRRR-RUMBLE—!
From deep within the creature’s cavernous belly came a sound like an underground mudslide collapsing into an underground cave.
The granite flat stone slabs beneath Frank’s boots shook with a sharp, sickening hum.
Across the arena, the heat of the air dropped three degrees in an instant. It was followed by a nauseating wave of stale, high-pressure heat that smelled of scorched marrow and stale marsh gas.
Hall Master Han, still leaning against the cracked retaining wall, went entirely rigid with terror.
“The core!” Han shrieked, clawing at his face with bloody fingers. “The beast’s Primordial Dragon Core is self-exploding!”
In the upper stands, Chief Elder Wu staggered backward, nearly tumbling over the wooden bench.
“The parasite was merely the spiritual fuse!” Wu screamed to the fleeing elders. “Deprived of the Nether-Void deep ring, the beast’s tightly packed solar fire has reversed its breath flow into the Lower Dantian! The draconic dantian is undergoing overload collapse!”
“Evacuate the city!” a royal officer roared, drawing his sword and pointing toward the exits. “A Rank-2 Peak core blast will flatten the entire southern district! The blast radius is five hundred yards! Run for your lives!”
Fifty thousand spectators erupted into a blind, screaming stampede.
Nobles trampled silk canopies. Students vaulted over stone railings. Examinees dropped their jade scrolls and dashed wildly toward the arched tunnels.
On the royal terrace, Crown Prince Chu Tianxiao’s face was green with sheer panic.
“Guard the carriage!” Tianxiao howled, shoving his personal attendants aside. “Form a defensive turtle formation around me! If that beast detonates, I shall hold the entire Beast Pavilion accountable for three ages!”
Down in the pit, amidst the swirling dust and screaming chaos, Frank didn’t run.
He stood directly beside the shuddering forty-foot monster, his arms crossed over his chest. He watched the beast’s flanks heave with deep, cold and exact skepticism.
The dragon-hound let out a miserable, groaning canine moan that rattled the loose gravel around its paws.
Its swollen belly, tight and rounded like an over-inflated truck tire, visibly twitched.
Every few seconds, a hard, nearby knot pulsed against the scaly belly wall with a dull, hollow thump.
Frank walked up to the beast’s rear flank, balled his right hand into a fist. Then he rapped his knuckles firmly against the lower belly.
Thump-thump.
The sound was not the ringing, ringing chime of a volatile spiritual energy sphere about to go star-blast.
It sounded exactly like knocking on a sealed sack of dry gravel that had been left out in the rain to harden into concrete.
Frank shook his head in fed up disbelief.
“Exploding core my foot,” Frank scoffed, loud enough to cut through the panic. “That’s not an energy overload. That’s pure, pure dry pellet compaction.”
He stepped back and looked at the fallen elders clinging to the outer edge wall.
“Who’s in charge of feeding this animal?” Frank yelled, pointing a stern finger at Hall Master Han. “Did anybody ever give him fresh greens? Did anybody bother putting down a water trough, or did you just shovel twenty pounds of dry, baked spirit-beast kibble down his throat every morning?”
Hall Master Han froze, his jaw slackening. “Spiritual... Kibble? We... We fed him the Royal Beast-Nourishing Dragon Pellets! Forged from ninety-nine rare dried healing roots and powdered thunder-beast marrow!”
“Yeah, baked dry pellets with zero moisture content and twenty percent binding clay,” Frank snapped, rolling his eyes. “You stuffed thirty tons of lizard full of hard dog biscuits for two weeks straight and didn’t give him a single drop of liquid. His lower colon is packed solid like a clogged septic tank. The poor guy hasn’t taken a dump in fourteen days!”
The system screen in his eye flashed with glowing amber diagnostics:
The dragon-hound let out another pathetic, whimpering groan, curling its massive neck around to bury its nose into Frank’s denim pant leg, looking up at him with tearful, pleading eyes.
The pain of two weeks of impacted intestinal blockage was rapidly turning into acute barotrauma.
If the blockage wasn’t cleared, the internal methane pressure combined with its natural internal fire would cause a total blood-vessel rupture.
Frank turned his head toward the eastern gallery, cupped his hands around his mouth. Then he yelled at the top of his lungs:
“Niu Mang!”
High in the eastern stands, Niu Mang snapped to attention. He wiped a speck of sweet potato off his chin. “Here, Master!”
“The grocery sack in our handcart!” Frank ordered. “Grab that ten-pound winter daikon radish we bought at the morning market! Toss it down here! Now!”
Niu Mang didn’t hesitate for half a second.
He reached into the hemp sack on their two-wheeled cart, pulled out a huge, glistening white daikon radish. It was thick as a man’s thigh, crisp, heavy with underground winter moisture, and still carrying flecks of rich riverbed mud.
Niu Mang wound up his massive farm boy arm like a catapult.
WHOOSH—!
The ten-pound winter radish sailed across eighty yards of empty colosseum air in a high, graceful arc. It whistled softly as it cut through the smoke.
Frank didn’t even look up until the white vegetable reached the apex of its descent.
He reached out his right hand and caught the massive radish cleanly out of the air with a crisp, muffled smack.
Around the outer edge of the tiered arena, the fleeing fighters who had paused to look back stared in complete, pure horror.
“A... A winter radish?” Grand Elder Yan croaked, gripping the cold stone railing until his knuckles whitened. “He called for a mundane, uncultivated earthen root from a mortal vegetable stall?”
“Blasphemy!” a potion-maker elder shrieked. “To treat a divine Draconic Core Crisis with a common field radish! It lacks all spiritual flow rate! It will choke the beast’s spiritual throat and trigger the explosion ten times faster!”
“Is he insane?!” Crown Prince Chu Tianxiao barked from behind his wall of shields. “He’s playing with vegetables before the dragon’s maw! Shoot him down! Shoot the lunatic before he kills us all!”
Princess Jiang Ling’er stepped forward to the railing, her voice ringing out like a silver bell of total clarity.
“Ignorant fools!” Ling’er declared, her eyes blazing with regal power. “Master is applying the supreme Dao of Osmotic Moisture Restoration! A hardened dry-pellet blocked path can’t be dissolved by spiritual fire! It needs cellular hydration and raw plant fiber bulk to initiate peristaltic movement!”
Shen Shitou swung his iron sledgehammer with an ear-splitting CLANG against the granite floor, silencing the nearest guards.
“When a drainage under-road drain gets choked with dried mud, you don’t burn it with fire!” Shitou roared. “You flush it with water and shove a heavy plunger down the bore! Watch Master plunge the beast!”
Down in the pit, Frank didn’t care about their philosophical debate.
He held the ten-pound winter radish in his right hand.
The crisp vegetable was cold, heavy. Then it packed with nearly a gallon of natural vegetable water.
“Open up, Big Green,” Frank commanded, tapping the dragon’s upper lip.
The forty-foot dragon-hound, sensing that the young mortal in denim was its only hope of surviving the agony in its gut, parted its massive jaws wide open.
A cave of three nested rows of emerald teeth opened before Frank.
Frank didn’t flinch.
He gripped the stem of the ten-pound daikon radish, stepped right up to the beast’s gaping maw. Then he shoved the entire massive vegetable deep past the tongue into the back of the dragon’s throat.
SHOVE.
The cold radish lodged firmly against the pharyngeal entrance.
Before the dragon could reflexively gag or spit it out, Frank’s hands moved with lightning speed.
He slammed the dragon’s upper and lower jaws shut with a loud, wooden CLAP!
With his left hand clamped firmly over the beast’s scaly nostrils, Frank clamped his right forearm across the dragon’s snout. He held the mouth tightly closed.
“Swallow it, dog!” Frank barked. “Don’t chew! Down the hatch!”
The dragon’s massive yellow eyes bulged.
Its throat muscles convulsed in a huge, swallowing burst.
GULP.
A visible, ten-pound bulge traveled down the snake-like length of the dragon’s neck like a cannonball rolling through a canvas fire hose.
The high-moisture radish hit the beast’s gastric fire with an immediate, violent sizzle.
Frank didn’t wait a single second for the food to settle.
He dropped his stance. His denim work pants pulled taut across his thighs, his balance point sinking deep into the bedrock.
His right arm cocked back, his palm open, the callouses on his palm hard as cured oak.
“Time to clear the pipeline,” Frank muttered.
With the rhythmic, calculated timing of an auto mechanic bleeding a locked high-pressure metal tube, Frank delivered three in a row, heavy, open-palm strikes directly along the dragon’s lower belly spirit vein line!
WHAM!
The first strike landed right at the upper gastric junction. It sent a dull, bone-shaking sound ring through the beast’s armored ribs.
The entire forty-foot frame shuddered, the dragon-hound letting out a strangled gasp as the moisture from the crushed radish was wildly forced into the desiccated intestinal walls.
WHAM!
The second strike struck four inches lower, directly over the ileocecal valve.
A blast wave of high-pressure air rippled across the beast’s jade flank, causing dozens of thick scales to buzz with metal deep ring.
Deep inside the beast’s stomach canal, the hardened dry-pellet blocked path fractured under the sudden crushing pressure surge. It crumbled into porous gravel.
WHAM!
The third strike dropped with the finality of an anvil dropped from a work frames, landing squarely on the lower bowel terminus.
Fifty thousand fighters watched in stone-hard silence as a violent, ground-shaking ripple traveled from the beast’s stomach all the way down to its tail.
The three strikes were so precise, so devoid of spiritual waste, and so rhythmically timed together that every elder in the Beast Pavilion felt their dantians pulse in sympathetic shock.
“The Three Heavens Spirit vein-Cleaving Palms...” Hall Master Han whispered, his hands trembling against the cracked stone wall. “He struck not the flesh, but the core flow. Three bare-handed slaps, and the internal block is broken!”
“He solved an internal fire rupture with garden vegetables,” Grand Elder Yan muttered. He stared down at the arena in dazed shock.
Down in the pit, Frank shook out his stinging hand, wiped his palm against his denim jeans, and stepped back.
The Viridian Dragon-Hound’s eyes were the size of dinner plates, fully cross-eyed with a sudden, overwhelming, and utterly total sensation of coming soon release.
Frank pointed a thumb toward the distant drainage trench.
“Oh boy,” Frank muttered, backing away with urgent haste. “Here it comes.”