The echo of Frank’s third open-palm strike faded into the choking heat of the colosseum basin.
For three painful seconds, nothing moved.
The Viridian Dragon-Hound stood frozen on its four splayed paws, its neck stretched straight out. Its green scales shook with an eerie, high-hum.
Its jaw hung slightly slack, thick spit dripping onto the crushed flat stone slabs.
Its eyes, wide and glassy, stared vacantly at the opposite wall of the tiered arena, pupils dilated to the rim in frozen shock.
High in the royal gallery, Crown Prince Chu Tianxiao pushed past his armored guards. They leaned over the shattered marble stone railing with a cruel, triumphant sneer.
“Hahaha! Look at it!” Tianxiao laughed derisively, his voice echoing across the hushed tiers. “The monster is choking! The charlatan shoved a common field vegetable down the throat of a royal war-beast! He has suffocated the divine dragon!”
The Prince turned toward his judge attendants, his eyes flashing with vindictive malice.
“Scribe! Take down this royal edict!” Tianxiao roared, waving his sleeve. “The peasant in denim overalls has maliciously destroyed royal state property through gross incompetence! Summon the execution squads! The moment that beast drops dead, I shall have him flayed alive in the central square!”
“Indeed, Your Highness!” Grand Instructor Song chimed in, dusting off his purple robes with a servile smirk. “A divine draconic beast possesses sacred sky physiology! To treat its sacred dantian like a peasant’s pig trough is an unforgivable offense against the Heavens!”
Down in the pit, Frank didn’t even glance up at the screeching prince.
He was far too busy reading the underground sound shakes traveling through the thick rubber soles of his work boots.
GURRRRRRRR—
It began as a faint, low-hum, deep within the fractured granite beneath the arena.
Then it rose in pitch, escalating into a violent, churning deep ring that sounded like two grinding millstones chewing through river boulders.
RUMBLE-GURGLE—!
The dragon-hound’s belly visibly rippled like a canvas sail caught in a gale.
The water-rich cells of the ten-pound winter daikon radish, flash-boiled by the beast’s internal heat core, had let loose an instant water-pressure steam flush.
The hardened, fourteen-day buildup of dry spirit-beast pellets had fully crumbled into a boiling slurry of high-pressure sludge.
And now, four hundred and twenty pounds of pressure of trapped fiery gas was demanding immediate, non-negotiable sky way out.
The dragon-hound let out a panicked, desperate squeak. A sound that was utterly absurd coming from a forty-foot apex hunting beast.
It clamped its tail down tight between its trembling hind legs.
Its massive flanks began to shudder wildly, its talons digging ten-inch furrows into the solid mountain stone as it fought a losing battle against the unstoppable laws of fluid dynamics.
Frank took one look at the beast’s wild stance, recognized the universal panic of a house pet about to ruin an expensive living room carpet. Then he snapped into action.
He pointed a stern, authoritative finger toward the southern outer edge wall. There, a six-foot-wide open drainage ditch led into the city’s underground stormwater sewer.
“Hey!” Frank barked, his voice sharp as a job-site foreman’s whistle. “Not on the finished floor! Get over there! Go to the ditch! Move, move, move!”
What happened next shattered every precedent in the four-thousand-year history of the Beast Taming Guild.
The terrifying Viridian Dragon-Hound—an ancient draconic sovereign capable of obliterating an entire vanguard legion—didn’t roar.
It didn’t attack.
It tucked its tail even tighter between its trembling legs, lowered its huge head. Then it scurried across the arena floor with its rear end awkwardly hunched, moving with the wild, humiliated waddle of a scolded hound racing to the backyard before an accident happened.
Scritch-scratch-scritch-scratch!
Its massive talons slipped and scrambled against the smooth glass tiles as it desperately propelled its twenty-eight-ton bulk toward the chosen drainage trench.
“Look at that waddle!” an inner student in the western stands shouted, fully forgetting his fear. “The dragon is... It’s holding it in!”
“In the name of the Ancestors!” Hall Master Han gasped, his jaw nearly hitting the rubble. “It obeyed a mortal’s finger! It abandoned its territorial pride to seek a latrine!”
The beast reached the edge of the deep stone ditch.
With wild haste, it swung its massive hindquarters around, aiming its rear terminus directly down into the dark, heavy concrete under-road drain of the town storm sewer.
It braced its front paws against the heavy granite retaining wall, closed its eyes tightly. Then it clenched its teeth in heroic agony.
Frank dashed behind a five-ton granite pillar, grabbed his hard hat. Then he pulled his denim jacket up over his nose and mouth.
“Fire in the hole!” Frank yelled, ducking behind the stone barrier.
KABOOOOOOOOOOOOM—!
The sound was not an explosion of spiritual Qi.
It was an earth-shattering, bone-shaking gastrointestinal blast wave that rattled the teeth of every fighter within a half-mile radius.
BRAAAAAP-BOOM-WHIIIIIISH!
An ear-splitting roar of faster-than-sound gas, with an eighty-four-pound shotgun blast of crushed stone pellets, shot into the storm under-road drain with the striking force of a siege cannon.
The cast-iron grates covering the sewer mouth three hundred yards down the street blew forty feet into the sky like spinning manhole covers.
A dense, greenish-gray plume of boiled away sulfur and white-hot vegetable steam erupted from the drainage ditch. He rose fifty arm-lengths into the air like the exhaust plume of a launching rocket.
The blast wave swept across the colosseum basin.
It whipped the royal silk banners into shreds.
It blew the golden crowns off the heads of six high-born judges in the front row.
And with that blast wave came the smell.
It wasn’t a demonic stench of decay or the clean odor of ozone.
It was the unholy, packed essence of fourteen days of fermented high-protein beast meat, roasted sulfur root, and half-digested turnip mash, atomized at three hundred degrees.
Fifty thousand fighters instantly gagged all at once.
“MY EYES!” a Beast Pavilion elder wailed, clawing wildly at his face as tears poured down his wrinkled cheeks. “MY SPIRITUAL SENSE IS BURNING!”
“THE AIR IS POISONED!” Crown Prince Chu Tianxiao screamed, vomiting wildly over the side of the royal balcony. Meanwhile, his guards wildly flapped their cloaks to dispel the foul fog. “Scatter IT! FORMATION MASTERS, ACTIVATE THE WIND-PURGING ARRAY!”
In the eastern gallery, Princess Jiang Ling’er calmly reached into her sleeve and produced three cloth filters soaked in crushed peppermint oil. She handed two to Shen Shitou and Niu Mang.
“High concentrations of hydrogen sulfide and volatile organic esters,” Ling’er observed coolly through her mask. “A predictable heat-powered byproduct of rapid anaerobic decomposition.”
Shen Shitou took a deep breath through the peppermint cloth, nodding with deep, respectful awe.
“Master cleared the entire town channel in one stroke,” Shitou said, his voice muffled by the cloth. “Look at the drainage ditch. The flow is clear. The load-bearing pressure has fully normalized.”
Niu Mang chuckled, leaning on his shovel. “Smells just like the village hog pens on cabbage day. Tough for the prince, but look at that dog. That dog is in paradise.”
Down in the ditch, the green steam gradually cleared.
The screen in Frank’s eye updated with crisp, glowing green runes:
Frank lowered his denim collar and stepped out from behind the granite pillar. He waved a hand to clear the lingering vapor.
“Phew,” Frank muttered, shaking his head. “That could have stripped the paint off a Buick. Good thing the under-road drain was heavy with two-inch iron rods.”
Across the ruined colosseum, the Beast Guild elders slowly raised their tear-stained faces, blinking in dumbfounded wonder.
To their spiritual senses, what had just occurred was nothing short of a cosmic miracle.
“The Nine-Fold Purging of Dross...” Grand Elder Yan whispered, his voice shaking. “The legendary Catharsis of the Azure Dragon. The ancient texts described it as thunder and storm, yet here it happened through a drainage pipe!”
“He cleared forty pounds of sludge from its core channel,” Hall Master Han stammered. He stared wide-eyed at the ditch. “Look at the scales. Look at the pure jade light!”
Every fighter in the tiered arena turned their gaze toward the drainage ditch.
The Viridian Dragon-Hound was slowly pushing itself up on its front paws.
Its massive, armored frame, which had been bloated, inflamed, and shuddering with agony, was now lean, supple, and radiant.
The dull, sickly viridian hue of its scales had vanished entirely.
In its place, every single scale gleamed with the pure, semi-clear luster of polished Royal Jade, shimmering with soft emerald light that bathed the ruined arena in a calm, forest-like glow.
Its heart rate had normalized to forty-two beats per minute.
Its breathing was deep, steady, and easy.
The dragon-hound turned its huge head toward Frank.
The look in its huge jade eyes was no longer that of a beast looking at a master, nor that of a monster looking at prey.
It was the look of a sentient soul that had just been dragged out of the deepest pit of the burning underworld and handed a cool cup of ice-slow spring water.
It was total, total, soul-deep canine worship.
The forty-foot dragon-hound took three slow, lumbering steps toward Frank.
It didn’t bare its fangs. It didn’t raise its crest.
It lowered its massive snout until its nose was level with Frank’s chest, let out an affectionate, warm snort that rustled Frank’s flannel shirt. Then it gently nudged its temple horn against Frank’s shoulder.
Fifty thousand onlookers held their breath, fully dumbfounded by the sight of the realm-destroying titan rubbing its cheek against a mortal’s faded work shirt like a pampered kitten.
Not a single soul dared to speak. Not a single bird dared to chirp in the sky above Cloud-Mist Ridge.
On the royal terrace, Crown Prince Chu Tianxiao clutched his ritual dagger, his knuckles white. He stared down at the harmonious scene with eyes burning in bitter, numbed silence.
Frank reached up and patted the scaly cheek with a dry, tired smirk.
“There you go, Big Green,” Frank muttered, scratching behind the horn. “Feels a whole lot better when the plumbing works, doesn’t it?”