The glowing golden radiance pouring from the floating parchment bathed Frank in a halo of warm, shimmering light that reached twenty arm-lengths in every direction.
Across the four side terraces, fifty thousand fighters watched in stunned silence.
To the high elders of the Master Teacher Pavilion, this was not merely a divine phenomenon.
It was the manifestation of the Celestial Merit Registry. An ancient, legendary occurrence where the Heavenly Dao itself etched an immortal record of a fighter’s world-altering virtue into the fabric of reality.
“The Heavenly Merit Registry!” Grand Elder Yan cried out, clutching his stitched sleeves with trembling fingers. “The heavens themselves have opened their eyes! To receive the total devotion of a Primordial Beast is to harmonize the shattered frequencies of the cosmos!”
“Look upon the golden script!” a potion-made elder cried, prostrating toward the arena floor. “Those are the sacred glyphs of Antiquity! The Great Dao is granting him the power of the Ancient Shepherd! He holds the Golden Mandate of All Living Creation!”
“Five stars!” a young examinee murmured in trembling awe. It pointed at the five tiny suns rotating at the top of the golden halo. “Those five radiant sky bodies represent the Five Elements in supreme, untarnished balance! The heavens have graded his divine intervention as total perfection!”
To Frank, however, the floating display looked suspiciously like the post-service review screen from an online builder referral app.
PING.
Frank stared at the review text, his eyebrows slowly inching upward.
“‘Ear stop itching. Belly rubs good. Radish ten out of ten,’” Frank muttered under his breath, reading the customer feedback with deadpan disbelief. “A Net Promoter Score of positive one hundred. Well, at least the client is satisfied with the subcontractor’s performance. That’s better than Mrs. Higgins back in Naperville when I re-hung her garage door.”
He tapped the floating icon to claim the reward.
A soft, golden chime echoed through his mind as a crisp, glowing parchment sheet slid smoothly into his system ledger.
Four Golden Master Pages in reserve.
Four universal debugging overrides capable of bypassing land-wide reality restrictions, patching core memory leaks, or rewriting broken training techniques down to the foundational assembly code.
“Not a bad payout for three drops of stone oil and a fifteen-cent field radish,” Frank thought. He felt a rare moment of builder satisfaction warm his chest. “That’s four full system overrides in the bank. If the foundation pour on Ironwood Peak hits an underground limestone cave, I won’t even need dynamite.”
His quiet moment of skilled triumph, however, was wildly interrupted by a hoarse, poisonous screech from the edge of the pit.
“Peasant!”
Crown Prince Chu Tianxiao shoved past his quaking bodyguards. His silk boots skidded through the gravel as he marched into the glass-fused crater.
His stitched robes were smeared with drying mud and dragon mucus.
His golden coronet hung crookedly over his bruised forehead, one of its pearl tassels snapped off entirely.
His face was twisted into a mask of rabid, high-born arrogance, his bloodshot eyes fixed with burning hatred on the glowing emblem branded across Frank’s boot.
“That beast is the exclusive property of the Imperial Royal Dynasty!” Tianxiao roared, his voice cracking with shrill desperation. “It was captured in the Northern Border Campaigns with the blood of four hundred royal knights! It’s cataloged in the Imperial Beast Armory as a Tier-2 Strategic Asset!”
The Prince drew his jewel-crusted longsword, pointing the shaking steel blade directly at Frank’s chest.
“Hand over the contract anchor right away!” Tianxiao demanded, his teeth bared in a snarl. “Cut the laces from that filthy shoe! Surrender the spiritual bond to the Royal Court. Or I shall command the entire Northern Garrison to march upon this colosseum and flay you and your students alive for high treason!”
Behind the Prince, thirty royal guards formed a defensive semicircle. Their dragon-slaying axe-spears shook in their hands.
Not a single soldier wanted to take another step forward. But the Prince’s shrieking commands left them no choice.
In the eastern gallery, Shen Shitou stepped forward to the stone railing, his knuckles cracking with a sound like snapping dry firewood.
“Master needs only to give the word,” Shitou said. His deep voice shook with cold, terrifying calm as he rested his forged iron sledgehammer on his shoulder. “One swing at the foundation pillar, and that royal carriage will never roll again.”
Princess Jiang Ling’er gently placed her hand on Shitou’s forearm, her eyes flashing with icy disdain as she looked down at the screaming prince.
“Restrain yourself, Shitou,” Ling’er murmured coolly. “The Crown Prince has already nullified his own legal standing. Under Royal Code Section Eight, any state asset that causes total civil destruction without royal control is forfeited to the main emergency responder. Plus, attempting to sever a voluntary Life-Bond invites immediate karmic backlash from the old family spirits. The fool is digging his own grave.”
Niu Mang leaned comfortably against their cart, chewing a piece of dried fruit. “Master doesn’t need our help. Look at Big Green’s ears. That dog is about two seconds away from teaching the prince some manners.”
Down in the pit, Frank didn’t even flinch.
He didn’t look at the trembling sword point hovering six feet from his collarbone.
He didn’t draw a weapon. He didn’t invoke his defensive dantians.
He slowly turned his head to the side. He looked down at the massive, forty-foot emerald titan resting peacefully beside his boots.
“Hey, Big Green,” Frank said, his voice as casual as an uncle asking his dog to fetch the morning paper. “You hear this guy? He says you belong to him.”
The Viridian Dragon-Hound had been lying on its stomach, lazily enjoying the afternoon breeze and the delicious coolness of its cleared ear canal.
At Frank’s words, the beast’s jade pupils narrowed into two razor-thin, upright slits of black glass death.
The peaceful, emerald glow lighting up its scales vanished.
A dark, choking wave of draconic pressure—heavy as a collapsing iron mine—slammed down upon the center of the arena floor.
VUUUUUUM—
The loose gravel around Frank’s boots began to levitate three inches into the air as the gravity in the pit distorted.
The dragon-hound rose.
It didn’t leap or scramble.
It rose with the slow, terrifying, unrushed majesty of an ancient fiery island breaching the surface of a stormy ocean.
Twenty-eight tons of muscle, bone, and razor-sharp jade scales towered thirty arm-lengths into the air, fully blocking out the afternoon sun and casting a vast, cold shadow over Crown Prince Chu Tianxiao.
The dragon-hound didn’t look at the arena.
It didn’t look at the grandstands.
It stepped forward, its massive forepaws coming to rest right away beside Frank’s boots, perfectly shielding the young mortal behind its armored flank.
Then, with an agonizingly slow, deliberate motion, the dragon lowered its huge skull.
It brought its massive, four-ton snout down until its jaw rested comfortably against Frank’s left shoulder—treating the mortal builder as its personal, unmoving resting post.
The three nested rows of emerald fangs, each the size of a broadsword, were parted just wide enough to reveal the molten green fire crackling within its throat.
And then, looking straight down into the bulging, scared eyes of Crown Prince Chu Tianxiao, the dragon-hound let out a sound.
GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR—
It wasn’t a roar.
A roar was an attack. A roar was a declaration of war.
This was a low, underground, sound death rattle. A sound shaking at twelve Hertz that bypassed the ears entirely and rang directly against the prince’s ribs, rattling his heart inside his chest.
The air between the dragon’s nostrils and Tianxiao’s face white-hot to four hundred degrees in a split second.
The Prince’s jewel-crusted sword began to glow cherry red from the surrounding heat.
Sizzle.
The leather wrap on the sword handle melted, blistering the skin of Tianxiao’s palms.
“AH!”
The Crown Prince cried out in agony, dropping the glowing sword into the sand.
He fell backward onto his rear, his hands clawing at the dirt as he scrambled backward like a panicked crab.
The smell of singed silk filled the air as the heat from the dragon’s breath scorched the golden hem of his royal robes.
The dragon-hound didn’t chase him.
It simply kept its chin planted firmly on Frank’s shoulder. Its jade eyes burned with cold, ancient contempt. That let the choking sound growl rumble continuously through the arena basin.
Frank took half a step forward, his hands resting easily on his leather tool belt.
“Look, Prince,” Frank said, his voice flat and practical as he looked down at the cowering royal. “You want to talk about ownership rights? Let’s talk about contract law. Your royal handlers chained this animal to a stone pillar with undersized hardware, fed him unwatered pellets until his intestines turned to stone. Then he let a blood parasite eat his brain for six months. In any approved turf on earth, that’s gross criminal fault.”
The Crown Prince clutched his blistered palms, trembling in the dirt, unable to find words.
“Under standard subcontractor regulations,” Frank continued, tapping his boot heel against the bedrock, “the main builder holds a legal mechanic’s debt claim on any machinery or livestock abandoned on an unsafe site until all emergency triage invoices are settled. You haven’t paid for the stone oil. You haven’t paid for Niu Mang’s winter radish. And you certainly haven’t paid for my hourly labor rates.”
Across the tiered arena, forty thousand fighters gasped in collective, religious epiphany.
“The Karmic Debt Seal of the Heavens!” Grand Elder Yan whispered, his eyes shining with deep discovery. “The Master speaks of the foundational ledger of universal cause and effect! The Royal Dynasty incurred an unpayable karmic debt by tormenting the sacred dragon! By stepping into the breach and healing the creature, Master Lu has assumed the cosmic ownership of the beast through the balance of Heaven and Earth!”
“Such precise legalistic Daoism...” a royal judge muttered, tapping his brush against his official scroll. “To balance the sky ledgers with oil and a field radish. The Crown Prince’s claim is fully void.”
Tianxiao’s face turned an ugly, mottled gray. He realized that not a single soul in the entire colosseum—not the elders, not the soldiers, not the common students—stood on his side.
Frank reached up with his left hand and casually patted the beast’s scaly jowl, exactly like a farmer comforting a giant hound that had just chased a stray racoon off the porch.
“Easy, boy,” Frank said dryly, looking down at the sputtering prince. “Don’t burn him. Scorched silk makes a terrible mess, and I don’t feel like sweeping up ashes before dinner.”