The three-foot-thick circular dais of green spirit jade groaned beneath Frank’s work boots.
Network after network of glowing, spider-web fractures spread through the crystal-clear stone, emitting sharp, gun-shot cracks that echoed through the vast, vaulted hall.
CRACK! BANG!
Huge slabs of polished jade snapped along their natural crystal-clear planes, buckled upward by several inches as the bedrock beneath the foundation bent under an impossible packed load.
Grand Elder Yan clutched the edge of an overturned dark wood table, his knuckles bone-white, his jaw trembling with mounting panic.
“The dais is shattering!” Yan shouted, his voice nearly drowned out by the rising bass hum humming through the floor. “Look at his aura! His dantian aura isn’t expanding outward like a normal breakthrough! It’s... It’s vanishing!”
To any traditional fighter in the Jiuzhou Plane, breaking through from Tier 2 to Tier 3 was an act of explosive territorial spreading.
A 2-Star Master Teacher formed their Dantian Cauldron. Then, their spiritual aura would unfurl like a majestic banner, billowing fifty arm-lengths into the air, filling the entire hall with the scent of lotus blossoms and shimmering elemental halos.
Yet Frank sat cross-legged on the fracturing jade slab. Then, his spiritual signed name was doing the exact opposite.
It was collapsing.
It was contracting inward with the violent, unstoppable finality of a dying star plunging into its own core.
Ten arm-lengths of aura tightened to five.
Five arm-lengths shrank to one.
One arm-length vanished into the skin of his chest, disappearing entirely from the spiritual senses of the three hundred watching elders.
“He has failed!” a high-born mentor shrieked from where he lay pinned flat against the marble floor. His cheek was pressed painfully into the cold stone. “His Lower Dantian has suffered a total inward collapse! His core has evaporated into nothingness!”
“Silence, you blind idiot!” Grand Elder Yan roared back, coughing against the crushing pressure. “Look at the floor! If his core has evaporated, what’s dragging the entire pavilion into the earth?!”
The screen in Frank’s eye updated with crisp, glowing emerald runes, logging the physical settings of the newborn entity:
Frank blinked, reading the tracking data with cold builder scrutiny.
“Width: four point a tiny fraction of an inch,” Frank noted mentally. “About the size of a standard steel ball bearing from an angle grinder.”
Then his eyes tracked to the fourth line:
Local Gravitational Well: 12.5G -> Escalating to 48.0G.
“Whoa,” Frank grunted under his breath. “That’s a steep ramp-up curve on the local mass shifted weight. Better brace the subfloor.”
Frank shifted his weight, planting both boot heels firmly against the cracking jade dais.
The White Dwarf Seed crossed the threshold of forty-eight times normal weight of nearby curve. Then, the physical world inside the Grand Hall ceased to obey the normal laws of the mortal realm.
VUUUUUUM—SLAM!
An invisible, downward-crushing hammer of sky-high mass smashed into the hall!
The gravity pull didn’t radiate outward like a blast wave.
It pulled inward toward Frank’s Lower Dantian with the relentless, unbending fury of an open sinkhole!
In an instant, every single loose object within sixty yards sped up toward the central dais!
Three hundred bronze tea cups, forty fine china teapots, dozens of jade hairpins, and hundreds of bamboo scrolls slammed against the green jade dais in a chaotic, ear-splitting avalanche!
CLATTER-BANG-SMASH!
Pencils and wooden rulers snapped like kindling under the sheer crushing weight.
The heavy dark wood desks in the front three rows, each weighing three hundred pounds, tipped forward onto their front legs, their wooden frames groaning under forty-eight times normal weight of downward sideways tearing force before shattering into splinters!
CRUNCH!
“MY BONES!” an elder from the Refinement Court wailed, his forehead pinned flat against the marble floor beneath crushing, invisible tonnage. “I CANNOT LIFT MY HEAD! THE AIR WEIGHS TEN THOUSAND POUNDS!”
“THE GRAVITY OF THE HEAVENLY DAO!” Grand Elder Yan gasped. His elbows shook as he struggled just to keep his chest off the flat stone slabs. “THE CONDENSATION OF AN EMPEROR-GRADE FOUNDATION VESSEL!”
“HE IS NOT BUILDING A CAULDRON!” Chief Judge Wu shouted into the dust. “HIS DANTIAN HAS BECOME A Starry BODY!”
Across the hall, seventy high-ranking mentors and examinees fell flat on their stomachs, fully numbed by the fifty-gravity field.
Their robes pulled taut against their spines, their silver hairpieces flattened against their skulls, unable to lift a single finger against the overwhelming downward drag.
Only three people in the entire three-hundred-foot tiered arena remained standing.
High in the eastern visitor gallery, Shen Shitou stood with his thick legs spread wide, his boots sunk two inches into the splintered oak floorboards, his back muscles bulging like coiled steel cables as he held their two-wheeled supply cart firmly in place with both hands.
“Stand firm, Mang!” Shitou shouted through gritted teeth, his face flushed with hard effort. “Master is setting the cornerstone! When the cornerstone drops into the foundation trench, the ground always settles!”
Niu Mang crouched behind the cart wheels. He used his iron spade to wedge the left axle against a support column.
“Got it, brother!” Niu Mang grunted, laughing with hearty farm-boy joy despite the wind tearing at his clothes. “Feels just like holding a five-hundred-pound breeding sow by the hind legs! Just gotta keep your weight low and don’t let your heels slide!”
Princess Jiang Ling’er held onto the stone railing with one hand, her dark hair streaming wildly around her shoulders like a banner of black silk.
With her other hand, she held her brass steam pressure gauge close to her eyes, reading the dials with total exact ecstasy.
“Forty-eight standard terrestrial times normal weight,” Ling’er recorded, her voice trembling with scientific awe. “Nearby radius: twelve meters. The spatial metric has tightened by nearly three percent! He has forged crushed-star electron matter within a living container! A true miracle of clockwork heat laws!”
Down on the shattering dais, the White Dwarf Seed reached its final, stable balance.
CLINK.
The sound was not an explosion.
It was the clean, quiet, clear click of a hardened steel bearing seating itself perfectly into a greased bronze race.
The sky-high gravity pull vanished in an instant.
The air pressure rebounded with a hollow thump that made the ears of every fighter in the room ring like silver bells.
Loose fine china shards and broken wooden splinters settled back onto the floor with a soft clatter.
The three hundred elders, suddenly freed from the crushing fifty-gravity weight, let out a collective, gasping groan, clutching their bruised chests as they slowly rolled onto their sides in the debris.
Frank sat on the ruined, spider-webbed dais.
He lifted his hands, bent his fingers, and checked his pulse with his thumb.
Seventy-two beats per minute. Steady as a quartz clock.
His Lower Dantian felt cool, compact, and fully solid—no sloshing liquid Qi, no volatile star-fire flaring into his ribs, no spirit vein leaks.
Just a four-point-two tiny fraction of an inch sphere of ultra-dense matter spinning smoothly at the core of his physical being.
“Zero flaws,” Frank said to himself, nodding with deep, skilled satisfaction. “Zero leaks. Cleanest foundation pour I’ve ever carried out.”
Grand Elder Yan slowly pushed himself up from the floor, his silver robes torn at the knees, his ritual beard sprinkled with white marble dust.
He looked at the young man sitting peacefully upon the fractured dais with eyes filled with breathless, tearful respect.
“A breakthrough of cosmic deep ring...” Yan whispered, his voice trembling so wildly his teeth chattered. “In the ancient records of the First Epoch, when the Starry Sages condensed their Ancient Vessels, the heavens cried and the mountains bowed! But never... Never has a mortal condensed a vessel that warped the very weight of reality itself!”
“We’re gazing upon a living legend!” another senior judge cried, dropping to his knees and bowing toward the dais. “He didn’t merely step into Tier Three! He has redefined the very boundary of what mortal flesh can contain!”
The young high-born mentors who had sneered from the upper rows crawled backward in shivering terror, unable to meet Frank’s gaze.
Every drop of their high-born pride had been ground into dust by forty-eight times normal weight of total, undeniable physical power.
He took a deep breath, preparing to stand up from the dais and head down to the lumber market.
Then, his eyes caught the third line of his internal system display.
Core Heat: 1,200,000 K.
Frank’s eyes widened slightly.
One point two million Degrees of star-heat.
In the laws of stellar physics, a white dwarf star didn’t generate energy through hydrogen fusion like a main-set star.
It was an ultra-dense ember of crushed-star matter, slowly cooling over billions of years, streaming its huge stored heat energy into the surrounding empty pocket.
And while Frank’s Flawless Geodesic Cauldron had zero load-bearing flaws and zero spiritual leaks...
It was still bound by the first law of heat laws: Energy can’t be created or destroyed.
A core heat of one point two million Degrees of star-heat had to vent its heat exhaust somewhere.
Frank looked down at his system diagnostics, his engineer’s mind running rapid heat-powered counts.
“A white dwarf star cools at a rate proportional to its surface area and heat slope,” Frank muttered mentally, his brow furrowing with sudden concern. “Even at four point a tiny fraction of an inch, an emitter streaming at one point two million Degrees of star-heat outputs a sky-high heat flux. Without an external radiator loop or a liquid-cold air cooling jacket, that heat has to conduct through the nearest physical heat sink.”
He looked down at his denim jeans.
He looked down at his heavy leather work boots.
And then he looked at the solid mountain stone beneath his heels.
“The subfloor...” Frank whispered in growing panic. “My boots are grounding the entire heat circuit directly into the building’s foundation!”
“Wait a minute,” Frank muttered, a sudden look of horror dawning on his face. “Where are my cooling radiators?”
HISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS—!
From beneath the thick rubber soles of Frank’s steel-toed work boots, two thin jets of white-hot, white-hot steam shot straight into the floorboards!