The plaza beneath the Bone-Crushing Gravity Pagoda was paved with black meteor-dark rock and smelled of nervous sweat, burning incense, and raw fight-or-flight rush.
Over one thousand outer sect students were crowded onto the vast stone terrace, their colorful clan tunics and sect robes fluttering in the bitter mountain wind.
Above them loomed the Pagoda.
Nine stories of massive stone black dark rock, tapering into the grey overcast sky like a blackened fang.
Around its ancient eight-sided roof edges hung hundreds of massive bronze magic charm bells, silent in the wind. It was bound by heavy chains of magnetic iron that plunged directly into the underground bedrock.
A choking, latent pressure leaked from the tower’s closed bronze gates. A heavy, static charge that made the hairs on every student’s arms stand on end.
On the head grandstand, thirty outer court elders sat in high-backed sandalwood armchairs.
Among them, Elder Wu DeZheng stood conspicuous in his formal ritual robes of crimson damask.
The fat elder was clutching a silk handkerchief, wildly dabbing sweat from his many chins.
His eyes scanned the churning sea of students until they found Lin Ke standing near the western pillar.
Wu let out a trembling, relieved breath, discreetly tapping his pocket where his approved three-hundred-stone pension bounty was secured.
Lin Ke stood quietly between Meng Shan and Shen Yue.
He was dressed in clean, functional indigo clerk robes, with his pocket ledger and brass measuring tongs hanging from his sash.
His stance was motionless, perfectly balanced, his boots resting flat on the cold dark rock flat stone slabs.
tracking numbers check, Lin Ke commanded internally.
Tianfu. Status.
The system was green across all nodes.
To his right, Meng Shan held his heavy, sloped quarry shield, his broad face stoic, his distributed earth channels idling in an equilateral balance circuit.
To his left, Shen Yue had sixteen steadied Iron-Flame Wall and Magnetic Flashbang magic charms tucked into the heavy cuffs of her tunic, her dual soul intent humming in quiet, asynchronous readiness.
A cold murmur rippled through the crowd behind them.
The sea of students parted like sheep scattering before a pack of wolves.
Zhao Wuji strode onto the flat stone slabs.
The merchant heir was dressed in exquisite, dragon-scale brigandine forged from linked plates of gold-trimmed spirit steel.
His coronet was carved from purple jade, his hands wrapped in soft calfskin dueling gloves, and around his waist hung three high-grade defensive jade pendants humming with protective barrier wards.
Flanking Zhao was his five-man death squad.
At the point of the wedge walked Yan Chuan, the butcher of the Blood-Sabre Pavilion.
Yan Chuan’s serrated blood-sabre was sheathed. But his yellow, manic eyes were fixed entirely on Lin Ke’s throat, his lips pulled back in a wet, bloodthirsty grin.
Behind Yan Chuan marched four burly Qi Gathering 5 hired blades from the Grand Fortune elite guard, armed with heavy repeating crossbows, barbed steel nets, and fluted iron maces.
Zhao Wuji marched straight toward the western pillar.
He didn’t look at Meng Shan. He didn’t look at Shen Yue.
He stopped three paces in front of Lin Ke. His high-born jaw was tight. His eyes burned with an obsessive, murderous hatred that had festered over weeks of financial humiliation.
The surrounding students held their breath, scrambling backward to avoid the blast radius.
Zhao Wuji leaned in close, his voice a low, poisonous hiss that carried only to Lin Ke’s ears.
“All the paperwork in the world can’t save you today, Lin Ke,” Zhao whispered, his breath shivering with suppressed rage.
“The Commerce Trial has no power inside that tower. Elder Wu can’t stamp a biosecurity order to save your skin. My family bought the fourth floor. Every array master monitoring the upper levels has been paid twenty spirit stones to look the other way.”
Zhao’s gloved hand tapped the gold-trimmed handle of his short sword.
“You’ll not leave this tower on your feet. You’ll leave on a wooden stretcher, with every single bone in your limbs splintered into powder. And when your corpse is cold, I’ll buy the Seventh Ward for scrap and personally oversee the demolition of your furnaces.”
Lin Ke didn’t step back.
He didn’t draw a weapon. He didn’t clench his fists.
He looked at Zhao Wuji with the flat, deadpan, bone-weary tiredness of a senior systems engineer who had just been dragged into a meeting by an unfit product manager who didn’t understand why the database kept crashing.
“Senior Brother Zhao,” Lin Ke said.
His voice was calm, conversational, and fully heard across the surrounding twenty paces.
“If your family spent as much working effort calibrating fire melted rock waste as you do on premeditated assault... Your quarterly merchant earnings wouldn’t be down forty percent.”
Zhao Wuji froze.
His pale high-born cheeks turned from white, to pink, to a blazing bright, apoplectic purple.
Several outer students in the front row choked on their own breath, trying and failing to stifle wild snorts of laughter.
“You...” Zhao hissed, his fingers digging into his sword handle until the leather creaked. “You insolent, low-born—”
DONG!
A huge bronze chime shattered the tension.
High on the grandstand, Chief Presiding Elder Han—a towering Foundation Establishment master in black iron robes—stepped to the stone railing, raising a massive jade tablet toward the sky.
“The Hour of the Serpent has arrived!” Elder Han’s voice boomed across the plaza like rolling thunder. “One thousand students enter! Only the ten who stand highest upon the central pillars shall enter the Inner Sect!”
Elder Han slammed the jade tablet down onto the sounding stone stand.
“Open the Gates of the Gravity Pagoda!”
SCREEEEEECH-GRIND.
Beneath their feet, the black meteor-dark rock plaza began to tremble.
Deep within the underground foundation, huge iron gears—each thirty feet across and lubricated with whale oil—ground into motion with an ear-splitting, heavy-duty groan.
The thirty-foot-tall double bronze gates of the Pagoda, coated in green rust and sealed with hundreds of years of runic magic charms, slowly cracked apart.
WHOOSH.
Before the gates had parted three feet, the air pressure slope between the inside and the outside reversed with violent, bone-shaking force.
A choking, bone-crushing wave of packed gravity flux rolled out through the opening like an invisible tidal wave.
The air pressure doubled in a heartbeat.
“AH!”
“MY CHEST!”
“I CAN’T BREATHE!”
Screams erupted across the plaza.
Over three hundred outer students in the front rows were caught unprepared.
Their elastic spirit veins and living muscles buckled under the sudden, violent two-times downward sky load.
Dozens of young fighters were driven straight to their knees, their foreheads slamming into the flat stone slabs with wet thuds.
Two junior students from the Alchemy Hall vomited dark red blood, their tiny blood vessels bursting under the sudden high-pressure blast wave!
Zhao Wuji staggered, his dragon-scale brigandine clinking wildly as his knees bent three inches under the sudden, crushing weight.
Yan Chuan growled, planting his boots wide, his corded neck muscles bulging as he fought against the downward pull.
Across the trembling plaza, amidst the groaning, gasping, and kneeling students...
Lin Ke didn’t bend his knees.
He didn’t stagger.
His bare feet stood flat against the dark rock.
Beneath his pale skin, his Ashen Iron Lattice skeleton absorbed the downward gravity flux with total, silent, shaking-damped perfection, channeling every megapascal of excess weight cleanly through his heels into the planet’s bedrock.
Lin Ke looked through the widening bronze opening into the yawning, pitch-black inside of the first floor.
He reached into his sleeve.
He drew his iron metal pen.
He set the steel point against the calloused pad of his left thumb.
Crunch.
Pain flared sharp, real, and clear.
“Branch checked: main,” Lin Ke murmured into the roaring wind.
He took his first step forward.