The Grand Hall of the 1-Star Master Teacher Pavilion was an ocean of billowing white silk, gold-trimmed banners, and heavy sandalwood incense.
Over three hundred approved 1-Star mentors and dozens of visiting 2-Star elders from neighboring provinces sat in tiered rows of polished cedar chairs.
At the highest tier of the grand altar, Grand Elder Yan stood in ritual white-and-silver robes. He held a jade scepter that gleamed with faint sky light.
Beside him, twelve exam guards stood in solemn formation, each holding ritual silver bells and scrolls of gold leaf.
It was the Grand Convocation. The sacred assembly held once every three years to ratify testers who had achieved full 1-Star Master Teacher sign-off.
Usually, testers spent weeks preparing their ritual speeches, fasting for seven days, and bathing in orchid water to show spiritual purity.
Today, however, the air in the hall was thick with simmering resentment, high-born jealousy, and hushed, poisonous murmurs.
In the eastern gallery, a group of young, noble-born mentors from the capital’s elite clans leaned together. Their silk sleeves shook with indignant fury.
“An unranked village teacher from the lonely North Ridge!” one mentor hissed, glaring down at the stone stage below. “Gaining full sign-off on his very first try!”
“Not merely sign-off,” another noble scholar whispered, his knuckles whitening against his fan. “A perfect hundred-point score on both the Teaching Test and the Heart of Innocence Trial! Even the Third Prince of the Heavenly Sword Kingdom only scored ninety-two!”
“The Pavilion’s sacred standards have fallen into the gutter!” sneered a third, adjusting his stitched jade cap. “Look at him! He doesn’t even wear ritual scholar’s robes! He stands before the Grand Altar dressed like a wandering ditch-digger!”
Down on the lower stone dais, fully indifferent to the hostile glares boring into his back, stood Frank.
He hadn’t bathed in orchid water.
He hadn’t fasted.
He had spent the last forty minutes eating three scallion beef buns and watching a blind kid tap steel rods against a curb in an alleyway.
His work boots—now permanently bearing the glowing golden crest of the Viridian Dragon-Hound across the laces—left faint traces of dried mud on the clean white marble flat stone slabs.
His denim jacket was dusted with gray granite powder from the colosseum collapse.
And on his leather tool belt, pinned right next to his yellow carpenter’s pencil and tape measure, gleamed the two fresh bronze badges of a 2-Star Beast Grandmaster.
Frank tapped his right boot against the floor in a steady, impatient rhythm.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
He lifted his left wrist, checked his system timer. Then he let out a long, weary sigh that was clearly heard to the front three rows of dignitaries.
“Forty-five minutes of incense burning,” Frank muttered, loud enough to make the nearest judge twitch. “Twenty minutes of bell ringing. And now we’re listening to a ten-minute eulogy about old family virtue. Who scheduled this agenda? This meeting could have been an email.”
Grand Elder Yan, standing on the high altar with his scepter raised, looked down at Frank’s restless stance.
To the arrogant young mentors, Frank’s fidgeting looked like uncultured disrespect.
To Grand Elder Yan, however, it was a terrifying display of divine transcendence.
“Look at him...” Yan thought, cold sweat beading beneath his silver ritual hairpiece. “He stands upon the sacred dais of our Pavilion, where ordinary mortal teachers tremble in tears of humility... Yet his spirit is restless as an eagle trapped in a sparrow’s cage!”
Yan clutched his scepter tighter, his eyes misting with deep philosophical insight.
“He doesn’t disdain the Pavilion,” Yan realized in silent awe. “He disdains the mortal illusion of empty ritual vanity! In the eyes of an ancient sage who commands the primal laws of stonework and tames draconic disasters with a field radish, what are our golden scrolls? What are our silver bells? They’re mere children playing with painted pebbles! His time belongs to the Great Dao, yet we force him to listen to mortal recitations!”
Frank shifted his weight, crossing his arms over his chest.
The screen in his eye flashed with crisp amber text:
Frank looked up toward the high altar, his voice flat and direct:
“Grand Elder Yan. Can we skip the leftover introductory remarks? The barometer is dropping, an autumn cold front is rolling over the ridge in eighteen hours. My apprentices have twelve yards of foundation footings to pour on Ironwood Peak before the frost hits. I just need the stamped medallion and the town tax waiver so we can haul our lumber.”
A collective, horrified gasp ripped through the three hundred seated elders.
“Insolence!” a high-born judge shouted, jumping to his feet. “To interrupt the sacred invocation of the Founding Masters to speak of... Of foundation footings?!”
“How dare a junior tester dictate the schedule of the Grand Convocation!” another elder bellowed, waving his fists.
Grand Elder Yan raised his hand, his spiritual voice thundering through the hall like a bronze bell:
“SILENCE!”
The hall went dead quiet.
Yan turned his gaze toward the protesting elders, his eyes blazing with righteous fury.
“Fools!” Yan scolded, his voice shaking the silk banners along the walls. “Blind, ritual fools! You sit in your cushioned chairs, priding yourselves on hollow rituals and flowery verse, while Senior Master Lu considers the tangible reality of the earth itself!”
The elders shrank back, stunned into silence.
“Did you not hear his words?!” Yan proclaimed, stepping down from the altar stone base. “‘An autumn cold front is rolling over the ridge’! While we recite history from dead parchment, Senior Master Lu perceives the shifting sky currents of the heavens! He considers the shelter of his students! He considers the foundation of the sacred halls of learning! To build a safe hall for students against the coming winter—is that not the highest, purest manifestation of the Teacher’s Dao?!”
“Such practical foresight,” an elderly scholar in the back row murmured, nodding in agreement. “He considers the work before the honor.”
“Truly, we missed the point,” several mentors muttered, lowering their eyes in embarrassment.
Frank rubbed his temples with thumb and forefinger, shaking his head.
“I just don’t want the concrete to freeze before it cures,” Frank muttered to himself. “If the water freezes inside the pore structure, the crushing strength drops by fifty percent. It’s basic chemistry, not poetry.”
Grand Elder Yan dropped the final flight of white marble stairs, his silver robes trailing across the floor.
Behind him, two senior exam guards carried a heavy, polished sandalwood chest lined with dark purple velvet.
Yan stopped three paces in front of Frank.
With solemn, trembling hands, Grand Elder Yan opened the silver latches of the chest.
Resting inside the velvet lining was a pure, gleaming medallion cast from cold-forged sky silver, rimmed with fine, detailed filigree depicting nine spiraling clouds.
In the center of the silver medallion was etched a single, blazing star carved from a solid piece of Tier-2 Azure Spirit Jade.
Beside the medallion lay an amazing, flowing robe woven from the silk of thousand-year-old Cloud-Moths, shimmering with a soft, rainbow-bright pearl luster—the official Robe of Nine Clouds.
“Senior Master Lu,” Grand Elder Yan said, bowing ninety degrees from the waist, his voice filled with trembling respect. “By unanimous decree of the Grand Elders, we present to you the 1-Star Master Teacher Medallion and the Robe of Nine Clouds.”
The entire hall rose to their feet in thunderous, respectful applause.
Frank glanced at the gleaming silk robe, then looked down at his durable, oil-stained denim overalls and heavy leather tool belt.
“The medallion looks solid,” Frank said, picking up the heavy silver disk and testing its heft with a practiced flick of his wrist. “Good weight. Clean stamping. But you can keep the silk robe. Silk tears on exposed iron rods, and it stains if you get high-pressure grease on the cuffs. Denim breathes better on site.”
He tossed the five-thousand-coin silk robe back into the velvet box like an old rag.
In the visitor gallery above the western hall, Princess Jiang Ling’er watched Frank reject the ritual robe, a faint, amused smile gracing her lips.
“Silk fabric exhibits a pulling tear pushback of less than forty pounds per linear inch,” Ling’er remarked quietly to Shen Shitou. “In a construction environment with exposed steel iron rods and jagged stonework, silk isn’t merely impractical. It’s an active hazard. Denim overalls provide essential abrasion pushback and triple-stitched tool pockets. Master’s choice is exactly undeniable.”
Shen Shitou nodded with deep solemnity, resting his chin on his sledgehammer handle. “My mother made me a silk shirt once for the village festival. I leaned against an iron farm rake and tore the sleeve right off. A man can’t swing a twelve-pound hammer in silk without tearing out the armpits. Coarse denim is the only cloth fit for real labor.”
Niu Mang smiled warmly, brushing crumbs from his apron. “Besides, that white silk would show grease stains the first time Master checks the axle grease on our cart. You can’t work an honest shift in clothes that look like bridal veils.”
Grand Elder Yan swallowed hard, his eyes widening in understanding.
“Rejecting the worldly glory of the Robe of Nine Clouds...” Yan whispered to the exam guards, his heart hammering against his ribs. “He chooses the coarse cloth of the working masses! A true Saint of the Common People!”
Yan took a deep breath. He pointed toward the huge, three-story obelisk of black spirit jade standing at the back of the grand dais.
“Senior Master Lu,” Yan said respectfully. “There’s but one final requirement to seal your sign-off. You must place your medallion upon the Central Heritage Stele to link your spiritual mind with the land-wide library archives!”
The three-story obelisk of black spirit jade towered over the dais like an ancient monolith carved from the midnight sky.
For three thousand years, the Central Heritage Stele had served as the spiritual nexus of the 1-Star Master Teacher Pavilion across four northern provinces.
Within its dense, crystal-hardened black glass matrix were encoded the spiritual imprints of over fourteen thousand foundational manuals, seven hundred historical treatises. The soul reflections of three hundred ages of approved masters.
Whenever an ordinary tester touched the stele, they spent two hours kneeling in trembling quiet focus, struggling with all their spiritual might to absorb even three or four foundational passages from the sea of old family knowledge.
The arrogant young mentors leaned forward, their sneers returning as they expected Frank’s coming soon humiliation.
“Let’s see how his mortal brain handles the Ancestral Stele!” a high-born mentor whispered gleefully. “The spiritual backing-up pressure from fourteen thousand manuals has driven dozen of examinees mad! If a mortal touches that monolith, his mind will be scorched to cinders!”
Frank turned his gaze toward the massive black jade obelisk.
His HUD flickered instantly, detecting the sprawling data storehouse humming beneath the black glass stone.
“A centralized archive?” Frank muttered, cracking his knuckles with a quiet smirk. “Alright. Let’s see what kind of spaghetti code your ancestors left behind.”