The circular quiet focus dais of green spirit jade stood in the exact center of the Grand Hall. He was surrounded by four carved stone pillars depicting the Four Auspicious Beasts.
Frank sat cross-legged on the smooth jade surface, his work boots resting flat against the stone, his denim overalls slightly loose around his knees.
To the outside observer, he looked like an exhausted laborer taking a well-deserved five-minute breather on an overturned five-gallon bucket.
His head was tilted forward, his eyes half-closed, and his breathing slow and regular.
In the tiered spectator galleries, the jealous murmurs that had been silenced by the pillar of silver light began to bubble to the surface once more.
Several high-born mentors exchanged knowing, disdainful smirks behind their painted fans.
“Look at him,” one young nobleman sneered, nudging his friend. “He sits fully motionless! He claimed he was unperturbed by the old family archives, yet the moment he sat on the dais, his mind went limp!”
“A mortal mind has its living limits,” another mentor mocked, swirling his tea cup. “Fourteen thousand manuals rushing into an uncultivated brain is like dumping the Yangtze River into a clay teacup! The vessel simply cracks! His sea of mind is likely drowning in a tidal wave of conflicting spiritual concepts!”
“He will sit there until sunset, fully numbed by Qi deviation,” a third scholar chuckled. “And when he wakes, he will be babbling like a madman, unable to distinguish between a fire hexagram and a water magic charm!”
Grand Elder Yan, standing at the base of the dais, frowned deeply at the chattering mentors. His spiritual sense was locked onto Frank with intense, protective concentration.
Yet even Yan couldn’t deny the strange, total absence of spiritual rough churning.
A normal fighter tried to synthesize even two conflicting training manuals. Then, their aura flared wildly.
Crimson and azure energy would churn in their chest like a boiling cooking pot. Their skin would flush red, their veins would throb against their temples. Their breath would hiss like escaping steam.
Yet Frank radiated absolutely nothing.
No elemental light. No swirling Qi vortexes. No sky halos.
Inside Frank’s mind, however, a heavy-duty-grade calculating hurricane was tearing through thirty hundred years of martial dogma.
Before Frank’s aiming cross-helped field of view, the fourteen thousand two hundred and eighty manuals were not poetic scrolls or sacred old family testaments.
They were lines of raw, uncompiled script. Fourteen thousand separate text files dumped into a single root directory.
And to a senior builder who had spent years auditing subcontractor blueprints, the sheer volume of load-bearing defects was staggering.
“File zero one,” Frank noted mentally, scanning the code blocks scrolling across his HUD. “Recommends circulating cold Yin energy through the Heart Fire spirit vein at midnight. File zero two recommends circulating solar Yang energy through the exact same spirit vein at noon. Both files fail to include a spreading joint, meaning the vessel suffers cyclic heat fatigue every twenty-four hours until the heart-artery valve ruptures.”
He swiped his hand through the mental screen.
“File four hundred and twelve,” he continued, shaking his head. “Tells the user to compress their Lower Dantian into a three-legged bronze tripod. Why a tripod? A tripod has high stress concentrations at the welds and zero load-bearing redundancy! If one leg suffers hydrogen embrittlement, the entire cooking pot tips over and dumps three thousand degrees of hot Qi into the lower bowel!”
Frank had seen enough.
He didn’t want a three-legged bronze tripod.
He didn’t want an ornate, dragon-carved jade cooking pot with decorative filigree that created churning flow and nearby hotspots.
He wanted a pressure vessel.
A approved, exactly optimized, leak-proof pressure holding vessel designed to withstand sky-high internal forces without a single psi of load-bearing warping.
He reached out his mental finger and tapped the command end-post:
[RUN CODE CLEANUP & MERGE SCRIPT: TIER 3 DANTIAN CAULDRON]
BZZZZZZZZZT.
The system’s merge engine engaged with the ear-splitting roar of a thousand supercomputers processing parallel datasets.
Red text flashed across his vision in blinding cascades:
Eighty-four thousand two hundred and nineteen defects were stripped, purged. Then he burned up in less than three seconds.
All circular loops were unlinked.
All extra spirit vein bypasses were deleted.
All superstitious ritual incantations were stripped from the order set like useless bloatware. It served no physical purpose other than wasting the fighter’s lung capacity.
What remained at the end of the compiler pass was not a five-hundred-page epic treatise.
It was a single, elegant, exactly flawless blueprint:
The Flawless Geodesic Cauldron (Tier 3 / 0 Flaws).
Its load-bearing shape was not a bronze pot.
It was a Buckminsterfullerene carbon-lattice sphere. A geodesic dome composed of linked equilateral triangles, the strongest, most stable sharp-angled shape in the physical universe, capable of distributing infinite inward pressure evenly across every single node.
Deep within Frank’s Lower Dantian, the changes began.
In Tier 2, Frank had forged a Tight-packed Star-fire Sphere. A volatile ball of solar fire spinning at sky-high speed.
Now, guided by the Flawless Tier 3 blueprint, that spinning sphere of star-fire didn’t expand into a hollow cooking pot to brew spiritual herbs.
Instead, the linked geodesic framework began to clamp down around the star-fire.
SQUEEZE.
The inward-pulling gravity force was instant, total, and total.
The star-fire sphere, which had possessed a width of roughly three inches, was wildly tightly packed by an order of size.
Three inches became two inches.
Two inches became one inch.
One inch became ten tiny fractions of an inch!
At that thickness, the atoms of spiritual energy could no longer maintain their standard electron shells.
The electrons were stripped from their nuclei, tightly packed into a state of crushed-star matter where the quantum crush-limit pressure pushed back against the inward gravity crush with sky-high force.
Down in the Grand Hall, the physical reality of the Jiuzhou Plane began to warp.
The air around the green jade quiet focus dais didn’t heat up.
It thinned.
SHUUUUUUUUUUUUUU—
A sudden, violent sky drop struck the three-hundred-foot hall like an invisible empty pocket pump evacuating a bell jar.
The three hundred seated elders suddenly found themselves gasping for breath. They grabbed their throats as their ears popped wildly!
“The air!” an elder in the front row choked, his face turning pale blue. “The air is vanishing! My lungs can’t pull breath!”
“Air pressure drop!” Grand Elder Yan shouted. His scepter shook wildly against his knuckles as he struggled to stand upright against an invisible, inward-dragging tide. “The surrounding Qi of the hall isn’t scattering... It’s being dragged inward!”
Across the floor of the hall, small, loose objects began to move.
Pencils, empty teacups, silk handkerchiefs, and dropped inkstones began to slide across the polished marble floor toward the central dais!
Scritch-scritch.
They moved slowly at first, then sped up. It slid like iron filings pulled toward a huge neodymium magnet.
In the visitor gallery, Princess Jiang Ling’er grabbed the wooden stone railing with both hands, her dark hair whipping forward across her face as the suction vortex pulled at her silk robes.
“Gravity well formation!” Ling’er cried out, her eyes shining with total, breathless fascination as she looked at her master. “He’s not constructing a standard spiritual cooking pot! He’s inducing a gravity collapse! The mass thickness of his core has crossed the crushed-star threshold!”
Shen Shitou planted his feet three inches deep into the wooden floorboards. He wrapped one massive arm around the gallery pillar and the other around their supply cart to keep it from rolling over the edge.
“Hang on to the cart, Mang!” Shitou bellowed over the howling wind. “Master is tightening the bolts! When Master tightens the bolts, the whole county feels the torque!”
Niu Mang gripped the cart wheels with both hands, his teeth bared in a grin. “Feels like when a summer twister rolls through the cornfields! Hang on to your hats, boys!”
Down on the dais, Frank sat fully unmoved, his hands still resting casually on his knees.
The green jade dais beneath his boots let out a sharp, crystal-clear CRACK.
A hairline fissure snaked across the three-foot-thick slab of spirit jade. It was followed by another, and another.
The hum shaking through the bedrock escalated from a low rumble into a high-pitched, singing whine that made the teeth of every fighter in the room ache with phantom agony.
Deep within Frank’s belly, the tightly packed sphere shrank past four point five tiny fractions of an inch.
The crushed-star electron matter locked into a permanent, crystal-clear lattice.
A tiny, blinding, ultra-dense white sphere of pure sky mass emerged at the center of his dantian.
Across the hall, the scene was one of utter pandemonium.
The three young high-born mentors who had mocked Frank moments earlier were suddenly thrown forward out of their carved chairs. Their bodies skidded across the polished marble floor toward the central dais.
“HELP!” one noble screamed, his silk cap flying off his head as his fingers clawed wildly at the cracks between the floorboards. “AN INVISIBLE HAND IS DRAGGING ME TO MY DEATH!”
“MY SPATIAL RING!” another shrieked, watching in horror as the heavy silver ring on his thumb was yanked toward Frank, dragging his arm along with violent force.
Heavy dark wood desks, bronze incense burners weighing two hundred pounds, and dozens of ritual brass bells began to slide across the floor in a chaotic, screeching stampede!
SCREEEEEECH—CLANG!
The heavy bronze burners ground against the marble tiles, leaving deep, polished grooves in the stone as they were inexorably drawn toward the outer edge of the green jade platform.
Grand Elder Yan drove the butt of his sky scepter deep into the marble floorboards, channeling all his late-stage training to anchor his boots against the floor, his silver beard whipping wildly around his face like a blizzard.
“Don’t resist with brute force!” Yan bellowed to the scared elders. “Cast your grounding magic charms! Lower your balance point! The Master isn’t using an offensive martial art—he’s warping the very fabric of terrestrial mass!”
Inside his dantian, Frank observed the quantum stiction of the crushed-star electron lattice with clean, steady care.
To Frank, this was not magic. It was the purest, cleanest form of clockwork energy storage known to physics.
A standard training cooking pot had a volume smooth speed of less than twelve percent, with massive heat leakage and total risk of over-pressurization.
A White Dwarf Seed, by contrast, had a volume smooth speed approaching total unity.
It didn’t leak. It didn’t deform. It didn’t suffer fatigue stress.
It was an unbending, tiny flywheel of crushed-star matter capable of absorbing and storing world-size levels of moving and heat energy without shifting a single hair-width out of balance.
The White Dwarf Seed had awakened.