In the martial underworld of the Southern Cloud continent, the Ghost Wolf Shadow Step was feared as one of the ten deadliest covert infiltration techniques. A grandmaster of the craft could sprint across dry autumn leaves without rustling a twig, cross a still lake without dimpling the surface tension, and slip through ancient sect wards like midnight smoke through a keyhole.
Commander Xue Sha was a pinnacle master of that art.
Leading his six elite killers in a tight, aerodynamic wedge, he glided across the grass of Sunset Peak at sixty miles per hour. Dual hook swords drawn, dark edges gleaming with lethal poison, his eyes locked onto the timber cabin forty yards ahead.
*Thirty yards.* *Twenty-five yards.* *Twenty yards.*
Suddenly, Xue Sha’s leading boot pushed forward through the dark—and met nothing.
No turf. No rock. Just empty, unyielding space.
"What in the nine—?!"
Before Xue Sha’s brain could process the drop, the sheer forward momentum of sixty miles per hour carried him and all six shadow operatives straight over the lip.
All seven elite Foundation assassins plummeted four meters straight down into the black pit.
*THUD. CRUNCH. THWACK.*
They landed in a tangled heap at the bottom of the ditch, cloaks flapping, elbows cracking against plate armor.
"An ambush trench?!" Xue Sha hissed, rolling to his boots with feline agility. His pride burned, but as a killer of twenty years, he didn't panic. "Formation, leap! Wall-run to the rim!"
He drove his dual hook swords viciously into the trench face, aiming to use the abyssal steel blades as climbing pitons to vault his body back to the surface.
*SKRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT!*
The hardened blades struck the vertical wall. But instead of biting into fractured granite, they skated across the mirror-smooth, vitrified obsidian glass like dull skates on wet ice. A bright shower of yellow sparks flared in the dark, leaving the laser-flat glaze with zero scratches, zero bite marks.
Xue Sha slid back to the floor, eyes bulging behind his mask.
"The walls... polished like mirror-glass?!" Xue Sha gasped. "Zero texture! No footholds! No grip?!"
"Commander!" a panicked whisper hissed from behind him. "My boots... there's metal coiled under the dust!"
Xue Sha looked down.
Coiled across the obsidian floor, gleaming in the gloom, were five parallel runs of heavy, bare copper wire—tied straight to the central grounding rod of Austin's thirteen-thousand-Kelvin micro-fusion hearth.
All seven assassins stood directly across the metal runs.
Their heavy, steel-studded boots closed the circuit.
*CLICK.*
A tiny mechanical arc snapped in the dark.
Then, the sun arrived.
*BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT-BOOOOOOOOOOOOM!*
It was no ordinary short circuit. It was a five-hundred-thousand-volt static discharge of concentrated stellar plasma detonating inside a confined, three-meter-wide obsidian resonance chamber.
A blinding wall of violet-white lightning erupted from the floor with the fury of a dying star.
The seven Late Foundation assassins never even had time to touch their emergency escape charms. The sheer voltage ripped through their meridians in a fraction of a millisecond, boiling the cellular moisture in their bodies into supercritical steam. In less than three breaths, their physical flesh vaporized, their shadow-weave cloaks burned to gas, and their bones ionized into microscopic white dust.
Their poisoned needles melted into glowing droplets of lead slag.
The deafening thunderclap was violently baffled by the twelve-foot depth and dense obsidian walls of the trench, muffled into the quiet night as a dull subterranean thump.
Inside the timber cabin, Austin rolled over in his pine bed, burying his cheek deeper into his linen pillow.
He muttered sleepily through a yawn:
*"...Mmm... mob grinder is doing work... drop rates sound crisp..."*
He pulled the linen quilt over his shoulder and drifted back to sleep.
***
Six o'clock sharp.
A clean morning breeze rustled the pine needles around the cabin. Dawn filtered through the Celestial Dragon-Silk curtains, painting the bedroom walls in soft, pastel lavender.
*Chime.*
Austin opened his eyes, feeling completely rested and sharp as a fresh razor.
He swung his legs over the frame, slipped into his straw sandals, and stretched until his shoulders popped in a satisfying sequence.
An amber log floated before him:
Austin stared at the summary, a grin breaking across his face.
"Level four already?" Austin chuckled. "Three hundred and seventy-five passive EXP while logging bunk time. And fourteen blades of tool-grade high-carbon steel. That's why automation is king."
He pushed open his bedroom door and stepped onto the porch.
Li Xiaoyao was already awake, sitting cross-legged in the courtyard mist in morning meditation.
"Morning, kid," Austin called out, grabbing a long-handled wooden rake from the wall. "Grab a basket and come help me clear the collection ditch. The mob grinder had a solid haul."
Austin walked to the trench edge and peered down.
The vitrified floor was clean as a surgery table. No blood. No gore. The plasma flash had atomized every scrap of organic matter.
All that sat on the copper wires were fourteen dark hook blades, seven charred leather belts, and seven embroidered silk storage pouches humming with spatial distortion.
Austin reached down with the rake, hooking the curved pommels of the blades and hauling them up the slick glass wall two at a time.
*Clatter. Thud.*
"Good salvage," Austin said, examining the dark blades. He noticed the curved billhooks at the tips. "Look at that profile. Nice recurve hook. High-tensile iron."
Instead of melting them down, Austin carried all fourteen hook swords to the vegetable garden behind the cabin.
He drove the blades upside-down into the rich, dark mountain loam in a neat, mathematically straight twenty-foot row. Then he fetched a ball of coarse hemp twine, running a taut line from hook to hook. The curved pommels acted as natural eyelets, holding the string firmly off the ground without slipping.
"Perfect trellis stakes for the climbing snow peas," Austin nodded, admiring the row. "Rot-proof iron supports. Won't buckle under heavy vine weight."
He walked back to the porch, picking up the seven spatial pouches. He tossed one to Li Xiaoyao.
"Here, kid. Little organizer pouch for your pocket junk."
Li Xiaoyao caught the silk pouch. The instant his divine sense brushed the wolf-skull crest, his jaw dropped in horror.
*A... A Void Spatial Pouch of the Blood Wolf Sect?!* *The Ghost Wolf Shadow Squad... fourteen legendary slaughter blades... driven into the dirt as garden stakes for snow peas?!*
Li Xiaoyao slumped onto the grass, clutching his chest in breathless, trembling worship.
Austin didn't notice. He was rummaging through the lead assassin's pouch.
Inside, tucked beside some useless bone talismans and spirit pebbles, were three heavy, solid billets of raw Abyssal Blood-Iron—dense, cold-forged tool steel meant for blade repair.
Austin weighed a six-pound bar in his hand. His fingers curled around the cold metal.
"Now that's proper stock," Austin muttered, his eyes lighting up. "High-carbon alloy. Good manganese content. High shear strength. I’ve been needing a real pipe wrench since day one."
He didn't waste a second.
Austin set up his workstation on the porch. He hauled a four-hundred-pound block of dense basalt from the foundation pit to serve as an anvil, setting it on a cured oak stump. He lit his portable hearth, channeling a tightly controlled ribbon of his newly upgraded fifteen-thousand-Kelvin plasma into the firebox.
No smoky coal forge. No sulfur clinkers. Just pure, clean thermal induction.
Austin gripped the first billet with heavy tongs and thrust it into the plasma cone. Within twenty seconds, the dark metal bloomed from dull red into radiant, glowing orange.
He pulled the bar, planted his boots, and brought his heavy iron hammer down.
*CLANG.*
The impact vibrated right up Austin's forearms. Sparks cascaded across the basalt block.
*CLANG. CLANG. TONG.*
Austin worked with rhythmic, practiced economy. He drew out the heavy shank, forging a stout I-beam cross section that would resist immense bending torque. He upset the head stock, flattening and squaring the housing where the jaws would seat. He hot-punched the rectangular throat opening, driving a tapered steel drift through the orange iron to form the internal guide channel.
Next came the movable hook jaw.
He took a second billet of high-carbon stock, forging the distinct L-shaped upper jaw. On the shank, he used a cold-chisel and a small screw-plate to hand-cut deep, heavy Acme threads—square-shouldered threads engineered for brutal clamping loads.
For the adjustment thumbwheel, he forged a cylindrical steel collar. While the collar was cherry-hot, he used a hardened diamond punch to press clean diamond-pattern knurling across the outer face, ensuring greasy work gloves would never slip on the dial. Then he tapped matching internal threads through the center.
Finally, the teeth.
Austin clamped the forged jaw heads in his bench vise. He picked up a coarse, triangular bastard file.
*SKRRR-CHRR. SKRRR-CHRR.*
With steady, heavy strokes, Austin hand-filed deep, forward-canted alligator serrations across both the floating hook jaw and the fixed heel jaw. He cut them at an aggressive sixty-degree rake angle. Deep, razor-sharp teeth designed to bite into smooth round pipe and never let go.
Now, the heat treat.
Austin brought the jaw assemblies back up to bright cherry-red—just past critical non-magnetic temperature. He held them in the heat for thirty seconds to soak, then plunged them straight into a wooden bucket of mineral quenching oil.
*HISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!*
A thick cloud of white oil vapor mushroomed into the morning air. The grain structure froze into dead-hard martensite. Austin pulled the dark jaws from the oil, flashed them briefly through the outer plasma flame to draw the temper back to a tough, springy straw-yellow, and set them to cool.
He assembled the tool.
Austin slipped the threaded hook jaw into the housing, spun the knurled thumbwheel down the shank, and pinned the internal retention spring.
*Click-click-click.*
The jaw moved with butter-smooth precision. Zero slop. Half a millimeter of lateral tolerance.
It was a twenty-four-inch heavy drop-forged pipe wrench, dense and balanced, dark iron glowing with a faint, iridescent blue sheen from the abyssal alloy.
Austin hefted the tool, feeling its solid, comforting weight settle across his palms. He stepped over to a rough granite boulder beside the porch steps, locked the serrated jaws around a protruding corner, and hauled back on the long I-beam handle.
*CRACK.*
The alligator teeth bit deep into the stone without slipping a millimeter, snapping off a four-inch chunk of solid granite like a dry cracker. Austin checked the teeth. Flawless. Zero edge dulling.
"Now that," Austin breathed, wiping a smudge of mineral grease from the steel with his thumb, "is a proper pipe wrench. Good leverage. High bite. No more mickey-mousing stubborn fittings with pliers."
He rested the heavy tool across his shoulder, nodding with immense contractor satisfaction.
***
Thirty miles north, in the subterranean depths of the Blood Wolf Fortress.
*CRACK! CRACK! CRACK! CRACK! CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!*
Seven deafening snaps echoed across the Ancestral Altar.
Seven glowing green jade soul tablets shattered into fine green dust simultaneously, within three-tenths of a second.
Patriarch Nether-Ghost sprang from his skull throne, his scarlet robes flaring like boiling blood.
"ALL SEVEN?!" Nether-Ghost roared, his voice rattling the leviathan ribs of the ceiling. "IN LESS THAN A BREATH?! NOT EVEN A MENTAL DISTRESS WHISPER?!"
Behind him, thirty demonic elders dropped to their knees, faces pale as rotting meat.
"Patriarch!" an elder wailed, trembling on the bone floor. "What kind of monstrous god-killing array is buried on Sunset Peak?!"