The morning mist clung to the granite cliffs like wet gauze.
Inside Classroom 404, the air was warm, dry, and smelled faintly of burning cedar wood and herbal tea.
Shen Shitou, Jiang Ling’er, and Niu Mang sat in a neat row across the clean pine floorboards. They were performing the thirty-six daily movements charted on the greasy brown butcher paper pinned to the wall.
Every movement was carried out with razor-sharp care.
Shitou extended his arm in Movement Twelve. Then, his bronze skin gave off a deep, metal hum like an iron anvil being struck in an underground forge.
Ling’er rotated her shoulders in Movement Eighteen. Then, a faint swirl of golden dragon vapor coiled around her slender wrists, purring like a well-lubricated turbine.
Niu Mang sank into his deep squat in Movement Twenty-Four. Then, the solid mountain stone beneath the floorboards shook with dense, mountain-shaking balance.
Yet, despite holding enough packed striking force to flatten a castle gate, all three students possessed expressions of pure, pure humility.
“Senior Brother,” Niu Mang whispered, his voice trembling as he held his squat. “Do you think Master will be pleased with our form today? I’m worried my left heel is three degrees off the blueprint.”
“Don’t speak during dynamic stretches, Junior Brother,” Shitou replied solemnly, his bronze brow furrowed in intense concentration. “Master stated that proper foot posture dictates thirty percent of total moving smooth speed. If your heel slips, you introduce twisting stress to the lower-back spine. We must not pollute Master’s flawless blueprints with sloppy execution.”
“Senior Brother is correct,” Ling’er added softly, her golden eyes focused on the butcher paper. “Master condescended to condense the highest mysteries of the Dao onto a humble sausage wrapper so that we mortal fools could understand it. To deviate even a hair’s breadth from his arrows would be the height of filial impiety.”
At the front of the room, sitting behind his freshly steadied wooden desk, Frank was fully unaware of the holy debate occurring six feet away.
He was busy with a ruler, a compass. A piece of blue chalk, drafting preliminary blueprints for a closed-loop hydronic radiant floor heating system.
“If I route two-inch copper tubing under the pine subfloor,” Frank muttered to himself, tapping his pencil against his teeth, “and tap Ling’er’s excess heat exhaust during morning tea, we can maintain a surrounding room heat of seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit all winter without burning through our kindling reserves. Simple passive heat exchange.”
Frank opened his DAO-QA dashboard to check the system status.
Frank glanced at the countdown timer and took a slow sip of hot water from his enamel mug.
“Two hours,” Frank noted calmly. “Just enough time to check the roof flashing and lubricate the door hinges.”
He had spent thirty minutes that morning fashioning a makeshift door hinge out of a strip of cured ox-hide and three square-shank nails, greasing the leather with animal fat to eliminate the irritating squeak that had plagued the doorway for twenty years.
Before Frank could take another sip of water, the peace of the mountain ridge was shattered.
CRACK-CRACK!
The sharp sound of bamboo stalks snapping and heavy, arrogant footsteps crunching through the gravel echoed from the trail below.
Loud, derisive laughter drifted through the morning mist, with the metal clanking of sword sheaths and ritual discipline armor.
“Look at this miserable dog pen!”
“Is this where Lu Zhen hides? It smells like wet straw and peasant manure!”
“Young Master Lu, be careful not to soil your velvet boots on the rocks!”
Shen Shitou, Jiang Ling’er, and Niu Mang froze in mid-stretch. Their heads snapped toward the doorway, their eyes instantly narrowing.
Outside the shack, a small army had arrived.
Over fifty senior freshmen from the Hongwu Academy’s elite classes were marching onto the ridge, fully surrounding the outer edge of Classroom 404. They were clad in matching azure-and-silver silk scholar robes, their chests adorned with the silver-crested badges of the prestigious “Heavenly Wind Pavilion.”
At the front of the mob stood a tall, slender young man with pale skin, sharp hawk-like eyes, and an expression of arrogant, high-born cruelty.
It was Young Master Lu Yan.
Lu Yan was the nephew of Vice-Principal Lu Xun, widely hailed as the premier swordsmanship prodigy among the freshmen, having broken through to Mortal Tier 1 Layer 8 at the age of seventeen. In his left hand, he held a formal eviction scroll stamped with the black wax seal of the Disciplinary Hall.
His right hand rested casually on the ornate jade handle knob of a five-foot silver-alloy dress sword sheathed at his hip.
“Lu Zhen!” Lu Yan shouted, his voice ringing with mocking disdain across the quarry. “Drag your crippled carcass out here! The forty-eight-hour probationary audit has arrived! By order of the Academic Senate, Classroom 404 is unsafe!”
Inside the shack, Niu Mang’s fists clenched, the granite beneath his bare feet groaning under a sudden surge of earth force.
Jiang Ling’er’s golden eyes flared with suppressed dragon heat. Meanwhile, Shen Shitou rose to his feet like an unmoving bronze tower. His hand reached for the twenty-pound sledgehammer resting against the wall.
“Students,” Frank said, his voice quiet, calm, and fully flat. “Remain seated. Morning mobility routine is thirty minutes. You have eight minutes leftover on the clock.”
“Master!” Shitou protested, his voice thick with anger. “They come to insult Master’s sacred gate—”
“I said stay seated,” Frank said, setting his mug onto the desk. “A good builder doesn’t let loud neighbors disrupt the work schedule.”
Before Frank could reach the door, Lu Yan lost his patience.
BAM!
Lu Yan delivered a vicious, front-snapping kick straight to the newly hung timber gate of the courtyard!
The force of his Tier 1 Layer 8 strike tore the seasoned pine plank from its frame, snapping Frank’s freshly oiled ox-hide hinge in half with a sickening RIP and sending the splintered gate crashing face-down into the mud.
Lu Yan laughed loudly, stepping over the ruined gate with his polished leather boots.
“Look at this pathetic excuse for a gate!” Lu Yan sneered, gesturing to his fifty snickering followers. “A strip of cow skin nailed to rotten firewood! Lu Zhen, you’re a disgrace to the uniform of an academy teacher! Vacate the premises right away. Or my senior brothers will drag you out by your ankles and break your fingers one by one!”
The doorway of Classroom 404 creaked open.
Frank stepped out onto the porch.
He was wearing his faded grey linen robes. His denim shop apron was tied securely around his waist. A carpenter’s pencil tucked behind his right ear.
He didn’t look at Lu Yan’s face. He didn’t look at the fifty armed freshmen surrounding the yard.
Frank’s eyes drifted slowly downward, landing on the shattered piece of ox-hide leather lying in the puddle.
Frank stared at the torn hinge for five seconds in complete, unbroken silence.
“You kicked the door,” Frank said.
His voice wasn’t angry. It was that terrible, deadpan, icy tone of a tired handyman who had just spent forty-five minutes carefully aligning a custom cabinet latch, only to watch a drunk teenager kick it open with a steel-toed boot.
Lu Yan sneered, folding his arms across his silk robes. “I kicked your door! What of it, you crippled trash?! It was an eyesore! This entire mountain belongs to my uncle’s estate now!”
“That hinge was custom-fitted thirty minutes ago,” Frank said. He stepped down from the porch, his leather boots crunching softly against the gravel. “The ox-hide was cured with beeswax. The animal fat grease took ten minutes to work into the grain. And you kicked it right through the mounting screws.”
Frank reached into his pocket, pulled out a small brass stub of chalk. Then he pointed it directly at Lu Yan’s nose.
“You owe me forty copper coins for material replacement and fifteen minutes of skilled labor. Pay up, or I’m adding a property damage check to your student record.”
A deep, choking silence dropped over the quarry ridge.
The fifty senior freshmen stared at Frank with wide, confused eyes.
Forty copper coins?!
Property damage check?!
Did this disgraced, uncultivated teacher truly not understand the situation?! He was surrounded by fifty armed sword fighters! Young Master Lu Yan was an elite Tier 1 Layer 8 prodigy backed by the total power of the Vice-Principal!
Yet Lu Zhen was demanding reimbursement for a piece of cow skin?!
Lu Yan’s handsome face flushed bright, mottled crimson with sheer, unbridled humiliation.
In his entire life as a high-born young master of the Lu Clan, no one had ever dared treat him like a petty vandal who had broken a neighbor’s chicken wire!
“You... You insolent dog!” Lu Yan roared, his hand gripping the handle of his silver dress sword until his knuckles turned white. “You dare mock me with peasant babble about copper coins?! Do you truly think that because you enrolled three crippled beggars, you’re still a teacher in this academy?!”
Lu Yan drew his silver-alloy dress sword with a high-pitched, metal shriek.
SHINNNNG!
The four-foot blade caught the morning sunlight, gleaming with a brilliant, polished silver luster. Thin wisps of sharp, whistling wind qi coiled around the fuller of the blade, slicing dead leaves into ribbons before they even touched the ground.
“Lu Zhen!” Lu Yan barked, leveling the razor-sharp tip directly at Frank’s throat. “By order of the Academic Disciplinary Hall, you’re stripped of your title! If you don’t kneel on both knees, kowtow three times, and hand over the land deed to Classroom 404, I’ll sever your shoulder tendons and let you bleed out in the gravel!”
Behind Frank, the air in Classroom 404 suddenly warped with terrifying, explosive heat!
Jiang Ling’er stepped toward the threshold, her molten-gold eyes flashing with lethal royal wrath.
Niu Mang grabbed his trench spade, his Ancient Primal Bull aura causing the bedrock beneath the shack to crack like brittle fine china.
And Shen Shitou—towering, bronze-skinned, and streaming the crushing gravity of a fallen star—stepped onto the porch with his twenty-pound demolition sledgehammer resting across his shoulder.
Frank didn’t even turn around. He merely held up his left hand in a casual, two-finger gesture.
“Students, stand down,” Frank said, his voice cool as mountain spring water. “I told you: safety first on the job site.”
Frank turned back to face Lu Yan.
His internal DAO-QA console chimed softly, projecting a neon test cursor directly over the gleaming silver blade in Lu Yan’s hand.
Frank looked at the glowing blue-and-amber box, then looked at Lu Yan’s trembling, furious blade.
A faint, tired sigh escaped Frank’s lips.
“Young man,” Frank said, his tone entirely flat. “Before you go waving that decorative piece of sheet metal around, you might want to run a basic solid strength check. Because if you try to hit anything denser than a head of cabbage with that blade, you’re going to be picking steel splinters out of your forehead for the next three weeks.”