The afternoon sun cast long, golden shadows across the dust-choked ruins of the Cloud-Mist Colosseum.
Frank walked up the wide stone ramp toward the eastern gates with the unrushed, measured stride of a builder clocking out at three-thirty on a Friday.
Behind him, Princess Jiang Ling’er held the reins of their two-wheeled supply cart, her stance upright and regal.
Shen Shitou followed two paces back, his five-foot iron sledgehammer resting casually on his massive shoulder like a wooden broomstick, his gaze scanning the upper galleries for loose mortar or falling stonework.
Niu Mang walked alongside the cart, humming an off-key rural folk song while brushing stray sweet potato crumbs from his burlap apron.
To fifty thousand fighters watching from the stone terraces, this ragtag procession looked like an ancient mythological entourage dropping from Mount Kunlun.
A mortal sage in denim indigo, flanked by a fallen princess of clockwork wisdom, an iron-willed titan of physical destruction, and an earthy avatar of agricultural abundance.
The crowd stood in total silence, parting respectfully to clear a thirty-foot hall toward the grand arched exit.
Not a single elder dared to raise their voice.
Not a single examinee dared to breathe too loudly.
Then, from the shattered royal pavilion behind them, a frantic, bloodcurdling shriek shattered the sacred quiet.
“STOP HIM!”
Crown Prince Chu Tianxiao stood atop the fractured stone banister of the royal terrace, his arms flailing like a madman.
His stitched dragon-robe was shredded into greasy ribbons, revealing dirt-stained silk undergarments beneath.
His hair was an unkempt bird’s nest of tangled twigs and gray ash.
The golden coronet that symbolized his direct row to the Tianxuan throne was nowhere to be seen, lost somewhere in the mud pit where he had been sneezed into oblivion.
“Imperial Dragon Guard! Northern Garrison Officers!” Tianxiao screamed, his face purpling with uncontrollable rage. “Don’t let that charlatan escape! He has committed the ultimate sacrilege! He used foul demonic witchcraft to bewitch a Royal Strategic Asset! He has defrauded the royal crown!”
The Prince leaped down from the terrace. He drew a backup dagger from his boot, pointing its trembling steel blade at Frank’s back.
“I command you on pain of nine-generation extermination!” Tianxiao shrieked, his voice bouncing off the granite tiered arena like the screech of a dying crow. “Cut him down! Slay his students! Burn their cart! Anyone who kills the vagrant shall be rewarded with ten thousand gold coins and a hereditary marquisate!”
The thirty royal guards stationed near the outer edge gate flinched, their faces turning pale as curdled milk.
Ten thousand gold coins was enough to buy an entire county.
A hereditary marquisate was the highest honor a mortal soldier could achieve in a lifetime of service.
Yet not a single guard moved forward.
Not a single soldier raised his spear.
Instead, the entire squad took three timed together steps backward. He pressed their backs flat against the stone wall. He watched the Crown Prince like a lunatic dancing on a crumbling cliff edge.
“Traitors! Cowards! Scum!” Tianxiao howled, seeing his own guards refuse his command.
Driven fully insane by humiliation, royal entitlement, and the bitter taste of defeat, the Crown Prince lowered his head and charged down the ramp himself!
His boots pounded wildly against the flat stone slabs, his dagger raised high, aiming straight between Frank’s shoulder blades.
“Die, peasant!” Tianxiao roared, closing the distance to twenty paces. “Die for daring to humiliate the Royal Bloodline!”
Fifty thousand spectators cried out in horror.
“Your Highness, halt!” Hall Master Han screamed, scrambling across the rubble with outstretched hands.
“Despicable! An royal heir attacking from behind!” Grand Elder Yan roared from the high balcony, his face dark with fury.
Frank didn’t stop walking.
He didn’t draw a weapon. He didn’t even turn his head over his shoulder.
He simply reached into his pocket, checked his pocket watch. Then he spoke three quiet, flat words into the air:
“Big Green, sit.”
Fifty yards behind them, inside the glass-fused glass crater, the forty-foot Viridian Dragon-Hound opened one massive jade eye.
It saw the screeching human running toward its master with a shiny metal toothpick.
It recognized the grating voice that had blown the brass horn in its ear for six months.
The dragon-hound didn’t bother to stand up.
It didn’t summon its dragon-fire. It didn’t unleash its cosmic aura.
It simply took its huge, twenty-foot tail—a heavy, armored club of overlapping jade scales tipped with blunt defensive osteoderms—and gave it a casual, irritated swish through the air.
SWOOOOOOOOOOSH—!
The tail didn’t strike the Crown Prince.
Frank’s command had been non-lethal, and Big Green understood job-site safety rules perfectly.
Instead, the huge twenty-eight-ton whip displaced three thousand two hundred cubic feet of dense, stale air in a split second. That set off a nearby wind-cutting gale that ripped across the stone floor like the downwash of an unthrottled helicopter rotor.
A wall of tightly packed sky static slammed into Crown Prince Chu Tianxiao at twenty miles per hour.
WHAM!
The moving air blast hit the Prince like a mattress dropped from a third-story window.
The shredded leftovers of his golden dragon-robe were wildly ripped from his torso, shredded into yellow confetti that swirled into the upper rafters.
His dagger was torn from his hand, spinning seventy arm-lengths into the air before embedding itself harmlessly into the wooden roof of a food pavilion.
And with that air blast came the friction.
The static electricity generated by three thousand cubic feet of dry dragon-scales shearing through the air produced an instant, crackling burst of blue static-electric discharge.
ZAP-FIZZZZZZ—!
The tiny lightning arc snapped across the bridge of Tianxiao’s nose.
The heat was not lethal. It didn’t burn his skin.
It merely white-hot the air directly in front of his forehead for one-twentieth of a second.
Poof.
A tiny, fragrant cloud of gray smoke rose from the Prince’s brow.
Both of Crown Prince Chu Tianxiao’s immaculately groomed, royal dragon-shaped eyebrows—the pride of his high-born vanity—vanished entirely.
Ablated. Boiled away. Burned away down to the bare, pink follicles.
The moving backdraft lifted the bare-chested, eyebrow-less Prince off his feet. It sent him skidding thirty yards backward across the smooth flat stone slabs on his silk breeches like a curling stone gliding over fresh ice.
Scriiiiiiiitch.
He finally came to a halt right at the feet of his personal carriage, his head spinning, his bare chest bruised, and his forehead fully bald and shiny beneath the afternoon sun.
The system screen in Frank’s eye updated with a dry, humorous pop-up alert:
The colosseum dropped into a silence so deep that the sputtering of the carriage lanterns sounded like crackling fireworks.
Then, someone in the upper stands let out a strangled snort.
It was a royal scholar who had tried to stifle a laugh into his silk sleeve, only for the sound to escape like a squeaking bagpipe.
That single snort broke the dam.
The stands erupted into roaring, uncontrollable laughter.
“Look at his face!”
“His eyebrows! The Heavenly Dragon plucked his royal eyebrows!”
“He has the smooth brow of a newborn piglet!”
“Hahaha! Behold the Sovereign Majesty of the Crown Prince!”
The laughter rolled across the grandstands in ear-splitting waves. It echoed off the stone walls and rose into the clouds above Cloud-Mist Ridge.
In the upper pavilion, Grand Elder Yan raised his brush, writing furiously upon his jade archive scroll while wiping tears of mirth from his eyes.
“The Shaving of Royal Vanity!” Yan murmured with deep historical gravity. “Recorded in the Antiquity Annals: when a petty prince offends the Sovereign of Creation, the dragon doesn’t take his head, for taking his life would elevate him to a martyr! Instead, the dragon shears his vanity, branding him with the smooth brow of a clown for all eternity!”
“Such terrifying psychological warfare!” a nearby elder shuddered in respectful awe. “Master Lu didn’t shed a single drop of royal blood, yet he shattered the Crown Prince’s political legitimacy across the twelve commanderies! What general could match such boundless strategic insight?!”
Chu Tianxiao sat in the dirt, touching his bare, hairless brow with shaking fingers.
He felt the smooth, warm skin where his majestic royal eyebrows had been five seconds ago.
The realization hit him like a physical blow.
His pride was gone. His dignity was crushed.
His power was a laughingstock that would be mocked in every tea house, wine shop, and tavern across the entire Jiuzhou Plane before sunset.
“Aaaaah... AAAAAAH!”
Tianxiao let out a high-pitched, humiliated wail that sounded like a scalded cat.
He scrambled into his carriage on all fours. It slammed the gold-trimmed doors shut, shrieking at his driver through the curtain:
“DRIVE! DRIVE YOU FOOLS! GET ME OUT OF HERE!”
The royal coachman lashed the spirit-horses into a wild gallop.
The carriage rattled loudly over the cracked stone. That left behind a trail of dropped silk tassels as it fled through the northern gates in disgraceful, chaotic retreat.
On the eastern ramp, Frank didn’t even look back at the fleeing carriage.
He adjusted his leather tool belt. He pulled his carpenter’s pencil from behind his ear to check the lead. Then he nodded toward the street outside the colosseum.
“Right,” Frank said, his stomach letting out a quiet, hungry rumble. “Now that the circus has cleared out, who’s up for lunch? There’s a noodle stall by the south city gate that does hand-pulled noodles with beef broth for three copper coins a bowl.”
Shen Shitou’s eyes lit up with simple, honest joy. “With extra scallions, Master?”
“Extra scallions, extra chili oil, and a side of pickled mustard greens,” Frank promised. “Niu Mang, bring the cart. Ling’er, watch the curb.”
“Understood, Master,” Ling’er said with a graceful, amused bow.
Niu Mang pushed the cart forward, grinning from ear to ear. “I’m getting two bowls! Working that shovel worked up an appetite!”
The small group stepped out of the colosseum gates, vanishing into the bustling, noisy afternoon crowd of the capital’s trade district, leaving behind a transformed Beast Guild, a legendary myth. A city that would never look at a carpenter in denim the same way again.