The blast wave was not an explosion of fire. It was an instant reversal of load-bearing gravity.
The moment the integer overflowed into negative territory, the Foundational Ward Pylon tried to fade negative two billion units of load by wildly repelling its own foundational anchors.
The twelve-foot obelisk of black Precursor slate shattered into ten thousand razor-sharp black glass needles.
The bone-shaking repulsive force blew Overseer Hu backward with terrifying moving violence. The bronze breastplate across his chest caved inward with a sickening metal crunch, the heavy ritual broadsword snapping into three jagged pieces that whipped through the air like shrapnel.
Hu tumbled through the air. It screamed in agony as the blast wave hurled him forty feet across the courtyard. It smashed him directly through the heavy sandalwood pillars of the court pavilion.
The foundational pillars, already stressed by twenty years of unreinforced mining below, snapped in half.
CRACK! BOOM!
The entire eastern row of stone pillars of the Disciplinary Hall began to pancake downward.
Tons of white marble stone railings, carved jade roof edges, and heavy clay roof tiles collapsed in a total cascade of total collapse. The flat stone slabs beneath the court desk buckled upward. Then it dropped into the hollow void of the ancient underground ore-crushing cellar below.
Hu fell through the shattered floorboards.
A horrifying, grinding screech of rusted iron gears echoed from the dark cellar as Hu’s body plunged directly into the dormant teeth of the main high-pressure crushing mill.
The heavy iron teeth didn’t grind him to paste, but the twenty-foot drop onto solid iron machinery shattered both of his femurs and burst his lower dantian with a sickening wet pop. His spiritual core collapsed into an unrecoverable void. The crude Qi that had made him an arrogant tyrant bled out of his spirit veins into the cellar dust, leaving him a crippled, whimpering husk in the dark.
In the courtyard above, seventy guards were hurled onto their backs by the air blast, choking on a blinding, iron-hard blizzard of crushed marble and white lime dust.
Lin Tao had thrown himself behind the massive base of the broken pylon. He curled his body tight to protect his braced collarbone and his frostbitten arm.
Sharp fragments of stone rained down upon his back like hail, tearing his tunic and cutting his scalp. But the main vector of the blast passed harmlessly over his head.
He lay in the white dust for three slow breaths, waiting for the backup tremors to subside. The air was freezing, thick with limestone specks that coated his lungs like wet plaster. But his core heat was slowly normalizing.
Lin Tao sat up, coughing out a mouthful of bitter white lime.
The grand Disciplinary Courtyard was unrecognizable. Half of the amazing office pavilion had collapsed into a smoking mountain of marble rubble. The banners of the court bureau lay buried beneath shattered tiles. And everyone could feel the choking smell of chalk, crushed mortar, and scorched stone.
Through the drifting white cloud, the eighty miners stood in a protective semicircle around Tie Shan, untouched by the blast. Tie Shan had used his massive iron bar and broad shoulders to shield Old Man Geng and the foremost laborers from the flying debris.
The miners stared at the devastation with wide, respectful eyes.
The great Disciplinary Hall—the terror of three ages of laborers, the courthouse where hundreds of their brothers had been flayed, branded, and sentenced to slow death in the deep pits—was half in ruins. Its grand pillars were kindling. Its sacred ward pylon was gravel. And the tyrant who had starved them was broken in the dark cellar below, groaning in his own blood like a slaughtered hog.
Old Man Geng gripped Tie Shan’s arm, his knees shaking so wildly he could barely stand.
“The heavens have eyes,” the old smith whispered, his voice choked with awe. “The mountain has brought its judgment upon the wicked.”
Tie Shan didn’t speak. His dark eyes remained fixed on Lin Tao, his iron bar resting firmly on the flat stone slabs. The giant knew it wasn’t the heavens that had destroyed the hall. It was the seventeen-year-old boy in the torn tunic, who stood calmly in the drifting dust with an iron needle in his hand.
From the smoking ruins of the court desk came a wild, muffled scrabbling sound.
A figure emerged from beneath a collapsed sandalwood beam, crawling on hands and knees through the white lime.
It was Disciplinary Elder Song.
The elder’s luxurious sable furs were shredded and caked in gray dirt. His tall scholar’s cap was gone. He showed a balding, sweat-drenched scalp streaked with blood from a minor scalp graze. His thin face was pale as a corpse. His fingers shook wildly as he clawed his way out of the wreckage, coughing and wheezing like an asthmatic dog.
“My ledgers...” Song cried in frantic panic, staring at the collapsed pavilion. “The Grand Elders... If the Grand Elders see this... They will flay me alive... They will hang my head from the mountain gates...”
Lin Tao rose to his feet, brushed the white dust from his trousers. Then he walked through the fog until he stood directly over the trembling elder.
“They won’t hang your head, Elder Song,” Lin Tao said softly, his voice cutting through the old bureaucrat’s panic like a surgeon’s razor knife. “Not if your report explains the loss.”
Around them in the drifting chalk fog, the seventy guards slowly picked themselves up from the shattered marble flat stone slabs. Their polished iron polearms were bent, their bronze helmets dented and coated in white lime powder, their imposing formation broken into a scattered rabble of coughing, scared men.
They looked toward Lin Tao not with the contempt due to a common quarry slave, but with the paralyzing, superstitious dread reserved for ancient monsters walking in human flesh. They had watched him stand unarmed before a Foundation Establishment fighter, dodge a killing blow by an inch, and tap an iron-hard Precursor monument with a tiny needle until the mountain tore itself apart. None of them dared raise a spear. None of them dared speak. In the brutal hierarchy of the training world, true power didn’t stem from silk robes or official badges. It was carved into the earth by overwhelming, impossible to understand power.