CLUNK!
The moment Pei Xuan slammed the big red brass lever down to [10X GRAVITY], a deep, bass hum echoed from a thousand feet beneath the Sweet-Spring Well.
Down in the underground cavern, Ao Ming let out a cheerful dragon burp and blew a stream of hot golden-blue breath straight into the central array core. At the same time, all one hundred Black-Iron Magnet Pillars standing along the fifty-foot city walls flashed with blinding sapphire runes!
ZZZZZZZ—SNAP!
Three hundred and sixty feet up in the air—just ten feet above Envoy Lin’s head—a gigantic, translucent dome of interlocking golden-blue hexagons snapped shut across the entire five-mile sky of Red-Sand Oasis City!
Down on the streets, the forty-four thousand citizens, the camels, and even the fat ducks waddling around the noodle shop didn’t feel any heavier at all. Because of the Fusion Cube’s Smart Friend-or-Foe Grid, anyone standing on the ground or registered as a citizen felt nothing more than a cool, pleasant breeze.
Three hundred and fifty feet up in the air, however, it was a completely different story!
Up in the clouds, Envoy Lin was still standing on tiptoe on his bronze sword with both arms raised high above his head, holding up the roaring forty-foot sphere of compressed Crimson Immortal Fire like a proud god about to punish the mortal world.
“Huh? What are these blue hexagons in the sky?!” Envoy Lin frowned for half a second—and then his arms suddenly buckled at the elbows with a loud CRACK!
Even compressed Spirit Qi had mass and spiritual weight!
Under normal gravity, Envoy Lin could hold the forty-foot fireball above his head with one hand before throwing it down.
But the instant the 10X Gravity Dome snapped shut, that forty-foot ball of compressed Rank 4 fire suddenly weighed as much as a five-thousand-pound iron boulder—and Envoy Lin was holding it directly over his own skull!
“Wait—why is my spell so heavy?!” Envoy Lin’s eyes bulged out like a strangled bullfrog’s as his wrists bent backward. “Up! Stay up! Go forward, not down!”
Before he could push his hands forward an inch, the tenfold gravity yanked his own forty-foot fireball straight down onto the top of his head!
“NOOOOO! SCATTER! DISPERSE!”
Terrified of being roasted alive by his own ultimate move, Envoy Lin frantically bit the tip of his tongue and spat a mouthful of essence-blood into the fireball to forcibly cancel his own spell!
KA-BOOOOOOM!
Half-canceled at point-blank range, the forty-foot fireball blew up right in Envoy Lin’s face!
A huge black mushroom cloud of smoke puffed out three hundred and fifty feet in the air. The blast wave didn’t reach the ground at all, because the 10X Gravity Dome pressed the flames flat, blowing all the heat and black soot straight back into Envoy Lin’s robes!
Inside the smoke cloud, Envoy Lin’s thick black eyebrows and eyelashes were singed completely off, his topknot burst open into a frizzy, smoking black dandelion, and his face was painted pitch-black with his own spell soot!
And that was only the first second!
HONK—SQUAAAAAAWK!
Ten paces to Envoy Lin’s left, his prized thirty-foot Rank 3 Peak Red-Crested Wind Crane was halfway through a majestic wing-flap when its four-hundred-pound bird body suddenly weighed four thousand pounds!
Because Ye Guhan had already sliced off all twenty of its tail feathers, the giant bird was barely keeping its balance to begin with. When four thousand pounds of invisible ocean-floor gravity slammed onto its back, both of the crane’s thirty-foot white wings folded straight up over its head with a loud FLAP-SNAP like an umbrella caught in a hurricane!
“Squawk?!”
The proud Immortal mount didn’t glide. It didn’t flutter.
With its long neck stretched straight down and its bald pink backside pointing straight at the sun, the giant white crane dropped out of the sky like a four-thousand-pound sack of wet cement!
WHOOOOOOSH—WHAM!
Three hundred and fifty feet below, right next to the West Gate livestock pens, the roof of the camel barn was covered in six feet of soft yellow hay piled up to dry in the sun.
The giant Wind Crane plummeted straight through the hay pile, bounced once off the elastic mud floor of the corral, and landed upside down with its long bird legs kicking weakly in the air right in front of Old Yellow!
Old Yellow—who had been peacefully chewing on a sweet Meat-Potato peel surrounded by sixty admiring female nomad camels—slowly looked down at the giant white bird that had just squashed his favorite afternoon napping hay.
The golden-furred Rank 2 Beast-King camel narrowed his long eyelashes, worked his jaw in a slow circle for three seconds—hork, hork, hork—and spat a massive, two-gallon glob of Rank 2 Sticky Golden Camel-Phlegm squarely onto the crane’s head!
SPLAT!
The sticky golden phlegm glued the Wind Crane’s long beak, its red crown, and both of its wings tightly to the barn floor like fast-drying pine resin! Even when the crane woke up from its daze and tried to squawk, all that came out was a muffled “Mmph! Mmph!” while sixty desert camels walked over in a neat line and took turns stepping on its wings.
Meanwhile, three hundred and fifty feet above the central square, Envoy Lin didn’t even have time to mourn his bird!
Because the exact same tenfold gravity had just locked onto his body and the [Rank 4 Red-Copper Flying Sword] beneath his boots!
In the cultivation world, a Rank 4 Low-Grade Flying Sword worked by using twelve tiny Wind-Lightening Runes carved into the bronze blade to lift a one-hundred-and-fifty-pound cultivator into the air.
Now, under the Ten-Ton No-Fly Gravity Dome, Envoy Lin’s body suddenly weighed one thousand five hundred pounds, and the bronze sword itself weighed another eight hundred pounds! Worse yet, the downward pull of Ao Ming’s dragon-scale array pressed an extra eight tons of magnetic force directly onto the metal of the blade!
SCREEEEECH—CRACK!
The twelve Wind-Lightening Runes on the bronze sword flashed red with overload and popped like fried beans!
Right beneath Envoy Lin’s silk boots, the five-foot-long Red-Copper Flying Sword let out a heart-wrenching metallic groan—and bent upward at a ninety-degree angle at both the tip and the hilt, folding up around Envoy Lin’s ankles like a giant yellow banana!
“My sword! My thirty-spirit-stone flying sword!” Envoy Lin shrieked in horror as the bent bronze blade spat out a puff of black smoke and lost every last drop of its spiritual lift!
For half a heartbeat, just like in a puppet show, Envoy Lin hung suspended in midair three hundred and fifty feet above the plaza, looking down between his bent bronze boots at the tiny stone square below.
Then gravity remembered him.
“WAAAAAAAHHHH!”
With his charred red robes ballooning up over his head like an inverted tulip, the high and mighty Outer Deacon of the Crimson Cloud Immortal Sect plunged straight down toward the earth at eighty miles an hour!
Down in the central square, forty-four thousand citizens tilted their heads back and watched the screaming red dot fall out of the clouds.
“Look! He’s falling! The Immortal is dropping like a lead goose!”
“Lord Pei’s red lever really turned off the sky!”
Behind the stone horse-trough, Marquis Pei Zhan and Pei Heng stared upward with their mouths open so wide you could stuff an entire steamed bun inside.
“Uncle Lin is... falling?!” Pei Heng whimpered, rubbing his eyes furiously. “How can an Immortal fall off his sword?! Did his sword just bend like a noodle?!”
At two hundred feet above the ground, Envoy Lin was spinning head-over-heels through the air, his bare white long-johns flashing under his blown-up red robes as he frantically tried to pinch a hand-seal to cast a Rank 4 Wind-Cushion Spell before he splattered on the cobblestones.
Down beside the six-barrel cannon cart, Pei Xuan watched the falling cultivator through the brass crosshair sight, counting down the altitude cleanly on his RTS screen:
Two hundred and twenty feet... one hundred and eighty feet... one hundred and fifty feet!
“Nobody casts spells in my airspace without paying the toll first,” Pei Xuan chuckled, and yanked the wooden pull-cord for the cannon’s under-barrel [Anti-Air Spirit-Net Launcher]!
THOOOOOM!
A compressed blast of dragon-steam fired a glowing golden-and-black sphere straight up into the sky from the wide seventh tube underneath the Gatling barrels!
At exactly one hundred and twenty feet above the square, the sphere popped open into a twenty-foot-wide [Iron-Silk Scorpion-Glue Capture Net], weighted at all eight corners by heavy lead balls!
“What is THAT?!”
Envoy Lin had just pinched two fingers together to summon a wind cushion when the twenty-foot iron-silk net slammed straight into his face going sixty miles an hour upward while he was falling eighty miles an hour downward!
THWACK—WRAP—CLINK!
The eight heavy lead weights whipped around Envoy Lin’s spinning body three times in midair, trussing his arms, his legs, and his banana-shaped bronze sword tightly against his chest like a giant hairy caterpillar wrapped in a cocoon!
Even though the net didn’t stop him from falling, the elastic iron-silk threads—coated in Old Yellow’s sticky phlegm and Scorpion-King resin—acted like a giant bungee parachute that slowed his lethal terminal velocity just enough so he wouldn’t die on impact, while tilting his body so that his backside pointed squarely at the ground!
“WAIT! NOT THERE! MOVE THOSE CARTS!” Envoy Lin howled as the ground rushed up to meet his behind.
Directly below his falling trajectory, in the middle of the empty space cleared by the city guards, sat three large, rickety wooden pushcarts that a panicked merchant from the southern suburb had parked before running behind the shield wall.
Cart #1 was piled four feet high with overripe, squishy red summer tomatoes.
Cart #2 was stacked with five hundred pounds of sour pickled winter cabbages.
And Cart #3—parked right at the bottom of the slope—was a wide wooden vat filled to the brim with two hundred gallons of Old Guo’s Thirty-Day Fermented Stinky Gray Tofu Brine!
“Three... two... one... bullseye!” Boom-Pot Sun cheered, jumping up and down on the cannon cart.
CRASH! SMASH! SPLOOOOOSH!
Wrapped up like a red silk sausage, Envoy Lin slammed butt-first from the sky straight through the top of Cart #1!
Three hundred pounds of overripe red tomatoes exploded into a forty-foot geyser of red juice and seeds!
Without losing momentum, Envoy Lin’s backside smashed through the wooden axle of Cart #1, plowed headfirst through the five hundred pounds of sour pickled cabbages on Cart #2, and finally cannonballed with a monumental, wet GLUG-SPLASH straight into the center of Cart #3’s two-hundred-gallon vat of fermented stinky tofu brine!
The oak staves of the giant vat burst apart under the impact!
A tidal wave of greenish-gray, eye-watering, thirty-day fermented tofu juice—mixed with squashed red tomatoes and sour cabbage leaves—splashed across the center of the square!
When the flying wooden splinters and cabbage leaves finally settled, the entire plaza of forty-four thousand people fell dead silent for three seconds.
Right in the middle of the wrecked wooden wheels sat Envoy Lin Cang of the Crimson Cloud Immortal Sect.
His legs were stuck straight out in front of him. A cracked wooden cabbage barrel was wedged over his hips like a diaper. Three squashed red tomatoes sat on top of his smoking, dandelion-frizzy hair like a crown, while two soggy green pickled cabbage leaves hung over his ears. From head to toe, his gold-trimmed red Immortal robes were soaked in thick, bubbly gray stinky-tofu brine that smelled like ten thousand unwashed socks boiled in rotten eggs!
CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK!
Before Envoy Lin could even groan, Abacus Su sprinted up to a safe distance of fifteen feet away, holding a clothespin over his nose with one hand while clicking his golden abacus furiously with the other!
“Update to Debtor #216’s Municipal Account!” Abacus Su shouted into his loudspeaker conch so the whole city could hear every word. “Destruction of three Grade-2 agricultural pushcarts: three thousand silver taels! Three hundred catties of organic red tomatoes: five hundred taels! Five hundred catties of sour pickled cabbage: eight hundred taels! One full vat of Chef Guo’s secret thirty-day fermented stinky bean-curd brine, aged since last month: fifty thousand silver taels! And unlicensed butt-first landing in a pedestrian zone without a parachute: twenty thousand silver taels!”
Abacus Su slammed the final bead into place with a loud DING!
“Debtor Lin Cang! Your total balance owed to Red-Sand Oasis City now stands at three hundred and thirty-four thousand, three hundred silver taels! Please remain seated in the cabbage barrel while our city guards fit your collar!”