The air in the Potion-maker Guild plaza plunged to fifty degrees below freezing in less than a heartbeat.
Elder Shen Kuo dropped from the sky like a falling glacier, his dark shape lit up by the blinding, jagged bright glare of thirty-foot-wide frost sword qi. The sheer moving pressure of the “Mountain-Cleaving Dragon Strike” tore the marble flat stone slabs apart, sending hundreds of frozen stone splinters whistling through the air like crossbow bolts.
“Die, crippled scum!” Shen Kuo’s roar echoed off the bronze pagoda, thick with the unbending, bloodline arrogance of forty ages of sword masters. “A discard who refuses the fire has no right to draw breath!”
The forty surrounding sword students raised their fists in timed together triumph. They shouted their old family battle cry:
“Divine Sword sovereign! Sunder heaven and earth!”
They had seen this strike decapitate high-tier spirit beasts and cleave granite fortresses in twain. To them, the conclusion was already written in stone. The insolent timber heavy cart would be crushed into kindling. The rebellious cripple would be split into frozen meat.
Shen Shitou didn’t blink. He didn’t retreat a single inch.
In the young man’s mind, there were no ancient battle cries, no poetic sword sutras, and no old family bloodline curses.
There was only Frank’s calm, nasal, deadpan voice echoing through his hearing canals like an audio training manual:
‘Footwork: Plant the left heel. Stance: Forty-five-degree hip rotation. Torque: Drive from the core. Don’t swing at the blade. Tap the funny bone.’
Shitou took a single, heavy step forward.
His steel-toed left boot slammed into the frost-covered stone with the solid, unmoving power of a steel foundation pile. His hips rotated forty-five degrees, sliding his balance point smoothly beneath the violent, dropping arc of Shen Kuo’s greatsword.
The thirty-foot crescent of ice-slow energy howled past Shitou’s left shoulder by barely three inches, carving a four-foot trench into the empty stone floor behind him.
Shen Kuo’s greatsword struck the stone, burying its tip ten inches into the granite roadbed.
Just as Frank had predicted, the elder’s severely hardened right shoulder locked up fully. The blasting blast wave of the missed downward strike wildly jolted back into Shen Kuo’s shoulder joint, freezing the man’s arm in place for one point eight painful seconds.
In that frozen window of time, Shen Shitou moved.
He didn’t unleash a roar. He didn’t summon an old family spirit.
He simply brought his twenty-pound forged hard dark metal-steel sledgehammer around in a short, compact, level arc with the casual, rhythmic care of a railway laborer driving a spike.
CLINK.
The flat, polished face of the hammer tapped Shen Kuo’s right elbow.
It wasn’t a bone-crushing blow. It carried barely fifteen pounds of lateral force.
Yet, to Shen Kuo’s internal nervous system, that tiny tap felt as though an electric arc-welder had been jammed directly into his main spine nerve!
The elder’s ulnar nerve wildly short-circuited.
The peak Tier-3 sword qi currently coursing through Shen Kuo’s arm hit the hardened, swollen blockage in his rotator cuff and rebounded backward into his own spirit veins like high-pressure high-pressure fluid hitting a slammed shut-off valve!
KER-BLAM!
Shen Kuo’s right sleeve shredded into gray confetti.
His fingers instantly splayed open in reflex neuro-burst, fully losing grip on the leather-wrapped handle.
The legendary “Azure Frost Greatsword”—an Earth-Tier old family heirloom passed down through seven ages of the Divine Sword Clan—slipped from the elder’s numb hand and tumbled into the air.
Before the sword could touch the ground, Shen Shitou’s left hand shot out like an iron vice, snatching the five-foot blade out of mid-air by the flat of the steel.
Shen Kuo thrashed on the ground. He grabbed his sparking, numb elbow, his eyes bulging in utter, horrified confusion. “My sword! He... He disarmed me with a tap?!”
Shen Shitou looked down at the gleaming, ice-slow steel in his hand.
Five years ago, this very sword had been held against his throat by his living father, Patriarch Shen Canghai, while clan elders poured boiling acid down his spine to “soften” his channels.
The memory of the acid, the laughter of the elders, and the cold indifference of his family flashed behind Shitou’s eyes.
He didn’t cry. He didn’t scream.
Shen Shitou raised the five-foot old family blade to his face. It opened his mouth, clamped his back teeth firmly around the two-inch-thick spine of the Earth-Tier steel, and BIT DOWN.
The forty surrounding sword students froze, their jaws dropping in collective, catatonic horror.
“What’s he doing?!”
“He... He’s putting the old family blade into his mouth?!”
Within Shitou’s skull, the dormant channels of his Primordial Star-Forged Iron Body flared to life. His jaw muscles tightened with forty thousand pounds of raw, high-pressure clamping force!
CRACK-SHATTER!
A sound like an exploding cannonball tore through the plaza.
The legendary Azure Frost Greatsword—hardened for three hundred years in ice-slow ice rifts, capable of slicing through dragon scales—snapped clean in two!
Shitou chewed twice.
Crunch. Crunch.
The dense, ancient alloy groaned beneath his teeth. Shitou casually spat a jagged, three-inch shard of ice-slow steel onto the flat stone slabs with a dull metal tink.
The silence that fell over the plaza was heavier than a mountain range.
A senior clan student clutched his own head with both hands, his pupils contracting to the size of pinpricks.
“He... He broke the Azure Frost Greatsword with his teeth?!” the student screamed, his voice cracking into high-pitched hysteria. “He ate the old family sword! The Trash Discard has the jaw of an Ancient Asura!”
Shen Kuo sat in the dirt. He grabbed his numbed right arm, his face drained of every drop of color. “My... My old family blade... Seven ages of glory... Shattered like a dried turnip...”
Shen Shitou tossed the leftover broken handle onto Shen Kuo’s lap.
Then, with the calm, careful rhythm of a farmer swatting an annoying fly, Shitou swung the flat back of his sledgehammer.
WHACK!
The hammerhead caught Shen Kuo squarely in his broad rear end.
The peak Tier-3 sword elder was launched into the air like a catapult projectile!
He flew sixty feet across the grand plaza, spinning through the air in a blur of gray robes and flailing limbs, before crashing headfirst into the marble horse-watering trough in front of the Potion-maker Guild!
SPLASH!
Green horse water, slimy moss, and wet oats geysered twenty feet into the air.
Shen Kuo’s boots kicked feebly out of the trough, his muffled gurgles bubbling up through the horse spit: “Glub... Glub... Blub...”
The forty grey-robed sword students dropped their weapons at the same time.
Clatter-clatter-clank.
Forty Earth-Tier and Mortal-Tier swords hit the stones in surrender. The students backed away across the frost-covered ground, trembling so wildly that their teeth clicked like castanets.
They looked at Shen Shitou—standing there with dark veins pulsing with star-iron heat. They wiped a fleck of metal dust from his chin. And felt an ancient, primal terror that went beyond martial arts.
This was not a fighter. This was a walking heavy-duty high-pressure press in human form.
Frank strolled forward, his hands still casually tucked into the front pockets of his denim overalls. He kicked a stray shard of the broken old family blade aside with the toe of his boot.
“Look at that brittle fracture,” Frank muttered, clicking his tongue in disapproval. “Too much carbon in the melt. Zero nickel-chromium grain refinement. No wonder it snapped like peanut brittle. You people really need to learn about heat treatment.”
Frank stopped before the frozen clan students.
He pulled his red carpenter’s pencil from behind his ear and pointed it at the nearest elder.
“Take your soggy uncle out of the horse trough,” Frank said, his voice fully flat. “And go tell Patriarch Shen Canghai that if he sends any more unlicensed scavengers to harass my rigging crew, my first student won’t just break his cutlery. He’ll come down to your family estate and tamp your old family shrine into two-inch gravel for our driveway.”
Frank turned to Shitou. “Shitou, did you track metal shavings onto the cart deck?”
“No, Master,” Shitou replied with total earnestness. “I spit them onto the town pavers.”
“Good boy. Sweep it into the gutter; iron scrap is a puncture hazard for the ox’s hooves.”
Frank’s DAO-QA screen gave off a crisp, cheerful chime in his field of vision.
Princess Ling’er exhaled a long, warm breath, the steam rising past her yellow hard hat into the cool air. A brilliant, radiant smile lit up her face as she looked at Shitou.
“Well struck, Senior Brother,” Ling’er said, adjusting her tool belt. “Master’s torque guidelines were carried out to within zero-point-five percent limit.”
Niu Mang leaned against his trench shovel, chewing on a dried grass stalk, and grunted in satisfaction: “Good smack. Very clean. The horse water will cool his swelling.”
From the upper windows of the Potion-maker Guild and the surrounding tea shops, hundreds of spectators peered out with white, horrified faces.
The news was already spreading across the capital like wildfire:
The disgraced discard of the Shen Clan has returned!
He caught an Earth-Tier flying sword in his teeth, chewed it like sugar cane, and swatted Elder Shen Kuo into a horse trough with a blacksmith’s hammer!
And leading him is an impossible to understand master in blue denim who commands the laws of the universe with a carpenter’s pencil!
Frank didn’t care about the rumors. He climbed back onto the ox-cart buckboard, took a long sip of his cold mountain tea. Then he pointed down the thoroughfare toward the grand plaza at the center of the capital.
“Enough horseplay,” Frank said, flicking the reins. “The registration desk for the Tri-Kingdom Potion-maker Grand Prix closes at four o’clock. We have a ten-million-stone purse to win so I can buy sixty barges of load-bearing I-beams before the winter freeze.”
The ox snorted, the iron-rimmed wheels groaned, and Classroom 404 rolled smoothly down the avenue. That left behind a shattered sword, a soggy elder, and forty students questioning their life choices.