The heavy iron portcullises of the Imperial Pill Plaza slammed down like guillotines, sealing forty thousand leftover spectators inside the outer edge.
Marching across the flat stone slabs in gleaming dragon-scaled gold armor came sixty elite Imperial Golden Dragon Guards. At their head walked Third Prince Jiang Feng, his royal dragon-silk cape swirling in the autumn wind, with an imposing figure who caused the surrounding elders to draw in sharp, scared breaths.
Patriarch Shen Canghai.
The sovereign leader of the Divine Sword Shen Clan was six feet tall, with a beard like iron needles and eyes burning with the cold, merciless gleam of peak Mortal Tier 3 sword intent. Behind him hobbled Elder Shen Kuo. His right arm was bound in splints, his head wrapped in bandages, still smelling faintly of stale horse water and pond moss.
Shen Canghai stopped ten paces from Frank’s testing station. His gaze swept over the thirty glowing Grade-5 pills, then over Frank’s denim overalls, before locking onto Shen Shitou with icy, total ownership.
“Shen Shitou,” Shen Canghai’s voice rolled through the arena like grinding granite blocks. “You were born from my blood. You were raised on the clan’s spiritual broth. Did you truly believe that hiding behind a wandering handyman would sever your filial debt to the Divine Sword Clan?”
Beside Frank, Shen Shitou stood like an iron pillar. His knuckles rested against the hickory handle of his twenty-pound sledgehammer, his jaw set in cold, unmoving stone.
“You threw me into the melted rock waste ravine, Patriarch,” Shitou replied, his voice fully empty of emotion. “My filial debt was drowned in your acid vats.”
“Insolence!” Shen Canghai snapped, his aura surging with razor-sharp sword qi that etched tiny cuts into the stone floor. “A father has the divine right to test his son’s metal! If the alloy is brittle, it must be purged in the crucible! Today, you broke the Azure Frost Greatsword and crippled your elder. Under Imperial Clan Law, you’re guilty of patricidal treason!”
Third Prince Jiang Feng stepped forward, unrolling a heavy royal parchment stamped with the scarlet wax seal of the High Aristocratic Court.
“Lu Zhen of Tianxuan!” Jiang Feng proclaimed, sneering with open malice. “I’m Third Prince Jiang Feng, head judge of the Imperial Clan Court! You and your three vagrant students are formally served with a High Trial Bill of Indictment!”
Jiang Feng raised the scroll high so the entire stadium could hear:
“Count One: Unlawful destruction and grand theft of the Divine Sword Clan’s old family Earth-Tier flying sword! Compensatory damages: five million spirit stones!”
“Count Two: Public defamation, battery of a royal sword elder, and intentional assault in the town right-of-way! Punitive damages: five million spirit stones!”
“Count Three: Unpermitted operation of an unlisted, high-pressure combustible explosive device within a chosen public sports arena!”
Jiang Feng pointed his gold-sheathed sword directly at Frank’s 16-inch wok and the copper grounding rod standing in the flat stone slabs.
“Under the Imperial Public Safety and Treason Decrees,” Jiang Feng smirked, his eyes glinting with hungry triumph, “your total assessed civil debt is ten million spirit stones! Plus, your illegal explosive black pan, your wire lightning trap. Your three students are hereby taken away into royal custody! Hand over the girl, hand over the tools, and kneel in chains!”
Up on the front row of the VIP seats, Consort Rong adjusted her jade veil. It smiled with cruel satisfaction.
Around the platform, the sixty Golden Dragon Guards leveled their heavy poleaxes. Their killing intent locked onto Frank, Shitou, Ling’er, and Niu Mang.
Princess Jiang Ling’er stepped forward, her yellow builder hard hat catching the sunlight. Her fingers tightened around her brass valve-wrench. Her eyes flashed with blazing crimson dragon fire.
“Jiang Feng!” Ling’er cried out, her voice cutting through the guards’ armor. “You planned my poisoning eleven years ago! You froze my dantians with Nine-Deep pit ice. Now you dare use clan court statutes to rob my Master?! Under royal row decrees, a prince who weaponizes town courts for personal vendettas is guilty of treason!”
Jiang Feng sneered: “Silence, runaway wench! A disgraced princess stripped of her royal pay has no standing in court! Once this peasant teacher is chained in the sulfur pits, you’ll return to the cold palace where you belong!”
Before the guards could take a single forward step, Frank let out a long, slow sigh.
He pulled a clean grease rag from his canvas apron, wiped the edge of his stainless-steel spatula. Then he tucked it into his tool belt. Then, he pulled his red carpenter’s pencil from behind his ear.
“Ten million spirit stones for a broken piece of brittle iron and an unpermitted safety fine ticket?” Frank muttered, shaking his head. “Who writes your legal briefs? An illiterate court guard with a crayon?”
In Frank’s eyes, the DAO-QA screen flared to life, scanning the legal summons and the four individuals standing before him.
Frank twirled the red pencil in his calloused fingers and took three unrushed steps toward Third Prince Jiang Feng.
“Prince clipboard,” Frank said flatly. “Let’s review your three counts before you embarrass your royal family in front of forty thousand witnesses.”
Jiang Feng’s face tightened. “What did you say?!”
“Count One: Destruction and theft of the Azure Frost Greatsword,” Frank said. He pointed his pencil at the bandaged Elder Shen Kuo. “Your elder drew that weapon unprovoked on a public thoroughfare and started an unpermitted lethal assault. My first student exercised lawful physical self-defense under Royal Common Defense Statute Section Four.”
Frank smirked. “Plus, Shitou didn’t steal the sword. The broken handle was dumped into a public town horse trough, where your elder left it sunk in algae and manure. Under Royal Maritime and Town Salvage Law, any discarded metal scrap sunk in a public drainage feature is classified as derelict refuse. Value: zero copper coins. Case dismissed.”
Elder Shen Kuo choked on his spit, clutching his braced arm in howling anger: “Derelict refuse?! My old family sword was derelict refuse?!”
“It snapped when someone bit it,” Frank snapped back. “If an Earth-Tier sword breaks on human back teeth, the steel had sixty percent grain embrittlement and three hundred micro-fissures. You should thank my boy for saving you from a fatal blade failure in battle.”
Frank turned his gaze toward Jiang Feng.
“Count Two: Public defamation and battery. Your elder flew sixty feet. That was because his neuromuscular system suffered a short-circuit from thirty years of untreated rotator-cuff bursitis. Shitou applied a fifteen-pound moving tap to his funny bone. If fifteen pounds of pressure launches a sword master into a water tank, that isn’t battery. That’s chronic osteoporosis. Consult an orthopedic physician, not a judge.”
The surrounding crowd erupted into muffled snickers. Several royal exam guards covered their mouths with their sleeves.
Jiang Feng’s face turned bright, furious crimson. “And what of Count Three?! Running an unlisted, dangerous explosive device in the royal arena! That black iron basin is an illegal weapon of mass destruction!”
“Count Three is your biggest joke of all,” Frank said, tapping his chest.
Frank unclipped the heavy white-gold medallion from his bag. Then he held it up to the sun.
The three blazing golden cooking pots and the royal dragon-crest of the 3-Star Grandmaster Potion-maker Token flashed with blinding, sovereign power!
Beside it, the double-starred white-gold badge of a 2-Star Master Teacher by Royal Reciprocity blazed all at once!
“Under the Royal Guild Charter of Jiuzhou, Article Nine,” Frank’s voice boomed across the entire stadium, “an approved 3-Star Grandmaster Potion-maker holding Master Teacher standing possesses total sovereign manufacturing immunity! I’m legally authorized to refine medicine in a cast-iron skillet, a baked-clay chamber pot. Or an empty bean tin on any royal territory without town interference!”
Pill King Dan Kui stepped forward, his eyes burning with righteous fury as he glared at Jiang Feng:
“Master Lu speaks the total truth! By the sovereign power of the Potion-maker Guild, anyone who attempts to seize Master Lu’s vessel shall be declared an enemy of the land-wide guild and stripped of all medical resources for nine ages!”
Jiang Feng froze. The Golden Dragon Guards paused, their poleaxes wavering in sheer, office panic.
Patriarch Shen Canghai stepped forward, his jaw tight with poisonous, high-born rage: “Even if your vessel is exempt, Lu Zhen, Shen Shitou is a genetic product of the Shen Clan! His bones, his star-steel channels, and his training were forged with our resources! He belongs to our family!”
“He belongs to Classroom 404,” Frank said coldly. “He has an employment contract, an apprenticeship certificate, and a tool belt. And if you want to talk about resources, Patriarch Shen, let’s talk about the twenty-five tons of cold-rolled load-bearing iron your clan foundry sold to the Royal Ministry of Works last spring.”
Shen Canghai’s flint-like eyes widened in sudden, tiny panic.
“Contract Number Four Hundred and Forty-One,” Frank said. He pulled a folded scrap of paper from his pocket. “Your clan billed the Emperor for twenty-five tons of ‘Pure Thousand-Year Cold-Forged Star Iron’ to build the support pillars of the Nine-Cauldron Crucible Tower.”
Frank pointed his pencil straight toward the massive, three-hundred-foot bronze tower rising behind them.
“I inspected the base flanges when we walked in this morning,” Frank said. His voice dropped into a deadly, pedantic whisper. “Your ‘Star Iron’ has a forty-percent melted rock waste dilution. You melted down rusty agricultural plows, mixed in ten percent lead solder, and sold it to the Royal Treasury at five hundred spirit stones a ton.”
Frank stepped within two feet of Shen Canghai, looking the scared clan patriarch dead in the face.
“Under Royal Building Safety Codes, supplying substandard load-bearing steel for public civic towers carries a penalty of full asset forfeiture and execution of the corporate board. You want to take me to court over Shitou’s bones? Fine. Let’s start with a careful metalworking court order of your clan’s main fire.”