The three-story obelisk of black spirit jade hummed with the dormant power of thirty hundred years.
Its polished black glass surface reflected the flickering light of three hundred animal fat lamps. It took in the shadows of the grand assembly into its pitch-black depths.
Grand Elder Yan stood beside the raised jade stone base, his ritual scepter resting lightly on his arm as he gestured toward the circular indentation in the center of the altar.
“Senior Master Lu,” Yan announced, his voice solemn and heavy with ancient tradition. “The Central Heritage Stele is the beating heart of our northern pavilion. By placing your newly forged medallion into the stone base, your personal spiritual brand shall be inscribed into the land-wide registry.”
He paused, glancing cautiously at Frank’s work-worn hands.
“A word of counsel, Senior Master,” Yan whispered in a hushed, respectful tone. “The stele is directly linked to the Great Northern Archive. Within its matrix live fourteen thousand foundational manuals. When the connection bridges, the piled up spiritual wisdom of the founding ancestors will surge through the link. Don’t try to absorb more than three or four passages at once, lest your spiritual sea suffer bone-shaking backing-up pressure.”
In the upper gallery, the high-born young mentors leaned forward. Their lips curled with cold, expectant malice.
“Here it comes,” one noble whispered gleefully, tapping his jade fan against his knee. “A mortal with no Foundation Establishment trying to screen with the Ancestral Stele! Even an Earth-Realm genius can only withstand the data pressure for ten breaths before vomiting blood!”
“He will be blown off the dais like a dry leaf!” another mocked. “Let’s see if his coarse denim overalls can protect his brain from fourteen thousand old family spirit signed names!”
Frank walked up the three white marble steps to the stone base.
He held the heavy, silver-rimmed 1-Star Master Teacher medallion between his calloused fingers.
To Frank’s aiming cross-helped vision, the black jade stele didn’t look like a sacred old family relic.
It looked remarkably like an external magnetic hard drive or an unencrypted network storage array with fully open permissions.
“Fourteen thousand manuals,” Frank muttered under his breath, shaking his head. “I bet half of them don’t even have an index table or a table of contents. Probably written in three different file formats with zero documentation.”
Frank didn’t light incense.
He didn’t close his eyes to meditate.
He didn’t circulate his breathing or recite the prayer to the founding ancestors.
He casually pressed the circular silver medallion into the matching recess on the cold black jade stone base.
CLICK.
The cold-forged sky silver settled into the black glass socket with the clean, satisfying clockwork snap of a fresh battery sliding into a cordless drill.
For half a second, nothing happened.
Then, deep within the three-story obelisk of black spirit jade, a sound began.
VUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUM—!
It wasn’t a gentle ringing hum.
It was the high-hum screech of an overclocked cooling fan spinning at twenty thousand turns a minute!
The entire black monolith began to vibrate so wildly that dust drifted from the ceiling beams seventy arm-lengths above.
The system screen in Frank’s eye flared with blinding, emerald-green notifications, scrolling at faster-than-sound speed:
A blinding, roaring pillar of pure, radiant silver light erupted from the summit of the Central Heritage Stele!
BOOOOOOOOOOM—!
The pillar of silver light shattered the roof tiles of the grand hall, blasting through the cloud cover and shooting five thousand arm-lengths into the azure sky!
The light was so intense, so pure, and so dense with ancient spiritual power that the entire capital city of Tianxuan was bathed in an eerie, midday silver glow.
Across the four side terraces, three hundred approved master teachers and thirty visiting elders recoiled in their chairs in total shock.
“THE HERITAGE STELE HAS Echoed!” Grand Elder Yan shouted, gripping the altar rail as his scepter clattered onto the stone. “IN THREE THOUSAND YEARS, THE STELE HAS NEVER PRODUCED A PILLAR OF LIGHT EXCEEDING TEN CUBITS!”
“FIVE THOUSAND CUBITS!” Chief Judge Wu wailed, tearing at his robes. “THE Starry ARCHIVE IS DUMPING ITS ENTIRE Storehouse INTO HIS SPIRITUAL SEA! HE IS RECEIVING THE Gathered KNOWLEDGE OF TEN THOUSAND Ages!”
“IMPOSSIBLE!” the young high-born mentors shrieked, clutching their heads in agony as the sheer spiritual pressure streaming from the stele pinned them against their seats. “A mortal brain can’t hold the weight of fourteen thousand manuals! His skull should have exploded into white bone fragments! Why is he not screaming?!”
Down on the dais, Frank was indeed not screaming.
He wasn’t even sweating.
He stood with one hand resting casually on the jade stone base, his other hand shoved into his denim pocket. He watched the progress bar on his HUD flash from zero to one hundred percent in zero point four two seconds.
To the fighters, he was a divine immortal absorbing the cosmic wisdom of the gods.
To Frank, he was simply downloading a tightly packed zip file over a high-speed fiber-optic connection.
“Bulk OCR dump completed,” Frank thought. He watched the fourteen thousand two hundred and eighty manuals organize themselves into neat, indexed directory folders inside his system memory.
The blinding silver pillar of light faded.
The three-story black jade obelisk let out a tired, clockwork click. Its surface cooling from glowed silver back to dull, exhausted black glass.
The Central Heritage Stele looked visibly drained, its internal Qi reserves empty like an empty car battery after a cold morning start. It had stored the old family records for three thousand years.
The entire hall fell into a stunned, terrifying, choking silence.
Three hundred elders sat frozen in their seats, staring down at Frank with trembling, wide-eyed terror.
Nobody dared to speak. Nobody dared to stand.
They looked upon the mortal youth in denim overalls with the dread owed to a reincarnated founding sovereign.
Frank reached out, popped the stamped silver medallion from the socket with his thumb. Then he inspected the fresh jade seal embedded in its face.
The single star of Azure Spirit Jade was now bordered by three nested rings of gold filigree. He marked full, unappealable 1-Star sign-off across all four northern provinces.
“Well,” Frank said. He tucked the heavy medallion into his leather tool belt right next to his twenty-five-foot tape measure. “That was fast. At least your data transfer speeds are up to code.”
He reached up with both hands, rubbing his temples with a deep, weary grimace.
“What’s it, Senior Master?!” Grand Elder Yan scrambled forward on his knees, his face pale with wild concern. “Did the old family wisdom overwhelm your mortal spirit veins?! Do you need the Nine-Revolving Soul-Soothing Elixir?!”
Frank looked down at Yan with the deep, soul-weary tiredness of a senior lead software engineer who had just opened a legacy codebase inherited from five different overseas outsourcing teams.
“I don’t need an elixir,” Frank sighed, shaking his head in disgust. “I need an aspirin. And whoever wrote these manuals needs to have their keyboard taken away permanently.”
Yan blinked in total confusion. “Their... Key-what?”
“Fourteen thousand two hundred and eighty manuals,” Frank said, ticking off points on his fingers with ruthless, cold and exact contempt. “And ninety-nine percent of them are blatant copy-paste boilerplate with different font choices. Chapter one in ninety percent of your internal breathing guides is literally word-for-word matching, except one guy calls it ‘Azure Dragon Breath in’ and another guy calls it ‘White Tiger Breathing’!”
The hall went dead quiet.
“And don’t get me started on the quality assurance,” Frank continued. His voice rose in irritation. “Eighty-four thousand circular spirit vein dependencies. Three hundred different ways to induce an acute heart arrhythmia during Foundation Establishment. Every single author skipped error handling on the Lower Dantian return loop, meaning if a student sneezes while circulating Qi, their gallbladder leaks into their spleen! It’s a complete load-bearing disaster!”
Grand Elder Yan’s jaw dropped so low it nearly out-of-joint.
The three hundred master teachers sat with their mouths hanging open, their minds entirely incapable of processing the blasphemous, exactly undeniable critique being leveled against the sacred old family texts.
In the visitor gallery, Princess Jiang Ling’er gently tapped her copper steam gauge. She nodded with cold, analytical agreement.
“Standard office decay,” Ling’er observed to Shen Shitou. “Over thirty hundred years, each generation of scholars merely copied their master’s notes without testing the underlying physics, introducing cumulative typographical errors and logic loops. Master has performed a root-cause code audit on three thousand years of martial literature.”
Shen Shitou chuckled, resting his sledgehammer across his knees. “Reminds me of when Master inspected the village grain elevator. The elders said the elevator was blessed by the mountain spirits. Master pointed out twenty rotted floor beams, three cracked pulleys. A bucket brigade that was moving backward. Truth always hurts folks who don’t carry a level.”
Niu Mang smiled broadly, peeling another roasted walnut with his thumb. “Master’s about to fix their books. When Master fixes a book, nobody has to read forty pages of poetry just to learn how to swing an ax.”
Down on the dais, Frank walked over to the central quiet focus platform. A circular slab of polished green jade designed for testers to sit and stabilize their dantians after receiving their sign-off.
Frank hopped onto the platform, sitting cross-legged with his elbows on his knees, resting his chin in his palms.
“Fourteen thousand manuals full of spaghetti code and unclosed brackets,” Frank muttered to himself, his eyes narrowing with skilled determination. “Let’s see what happens when we strip out the bloatware and run a proper compiler cleanup.”
He tapped the floating icon inside his eye:
[RUN CODE CLEANUP & MERGE SCRIPT: TIER 3 DANTIAN CAULDRON]
A low, dark hum began to resonate through the floorboards of the Grand Hall.
The air inside the three-hundred-foot grand hall suddenly grew heavy and cold. He dropped three degrees in less than two seconds.
The three hundred seated elders gripped their armrests in rising alarm. They felt their personal spiritual robes cling tightly to their chests as the air pressure plunged.
“What’s this shaking?” Grand Elder Yan whispered in dread, feeling his silver hairpiece buzz against his scalp. “He’s not merely meditating! He’s forcing the foundational concepts of fourteen thousand old family texts to grind against one another in a single spiritual crucible!”
“Madness! Total madness!” a potion-maker judge cried out. “If those fourteen thousand conflicting Daoist concepts collide inside his dantian, the spiritual backlash will level this entire mountain!”