In any decent sandbox, you held left-click. You listened to a cheerful *pop-pop-pop* sound effect while weed sprites bounced cleanly into your inventory grid. Simple. Clean.
Not here. In this broken, unoptimized engine, Austin had to haul back a real iron hoe with real, scrawny biceps.
"Avatar's got zero stamina regen," Austin grunted, rolling a knot out of his left shoulder and choking up on the rough ash haft. The grain bit into his palms like sixty-grit sandpaper. "No auto-harvest macro. No rested XP buff. Who tuned these physical parameters? You can't ask a player to do hard site prep without giving them a food buff to offset the metabolic burn."
He tapped the butt of the wooden handle against a rotting cedar stump. The iron head wobbled slightly on the tenon. Typical. The previous tenant hadn't even bothered to drive an iron wedge into the top of the eye to expand the wood. Dry rot, friction, and sheer dumb luck held the head in place.
"Held together with spit and bailing wire," Austin grumbled, shaking his head. "One heavy downward blow into a hidden granite ledge and this blade goes flying into the scrub."
He set his boots wide on the slope, sighted his line across the front yard, and brought the hoe down in a crisp forty-five-degree chop.
*SHING!*
The blade hit a dense snarl of Iron-Thorn Briars. Down in the outer sect valley, junior disciples spent three days with spirit cleavers and blister salve just to hack through a single patch. Stems like cured bamboo. Roots thick as a blacksmith's forearm, capable of prying apart granite footings.
The moment Austin's tool hit the briars, the ten-thousand-degree spark in his gut surged.
No drag. No tearing fiber.
A flash of blinding white heat erupted from the pig iron. The briars didn't burn; they sublimated. One millisecond they bristled with thorns; the next, they skipped combustion entirely, dissolving into a puff of white carbon ash on the breeze.
The dirt underneath flared cherry-red, liquefied under twenty thousand Joules of raw thermal discharge, and glazed over into a slab of mirror-smooth black obsidian. Quartz sand, feldspar, and iron clay flash-melted at seventeen hundred Celsius, vitrifying into seamless volcanic glass as cool air hit the slag.
Austin rested both hands on the haft, scowling down at the glossy black patch.
"Look at that texture glitch," he grumbled, poking at the edge of the glassy pool. "Render pipeline choked. Ran out of VRAM, dropped the dirt sprites, and threw up a generic reflective black shader to hide the seam. Lazy programming. Did nobody benchmark mid-tier rigs before rolling this out?"
He rapped the glossy surface with his straw sandal. It rang with the crisp, high-pitched ping of fine porcelain.
"Whatever. At least the grade is flat."
Austin didn't stop for water. When a commercial framing superintendent gets a bee in his bonnet about bad grade, the rest of the world ceases to exist. You never pour concrete on an uncompacted, uneven subgrade, and you sure as hell don't leave a four-degree tilt bleeding runoff straight toward your front sill plates.
For four straight hours, Austin worked Sunset Peak's courtyard in overlapping eighteen-inch grid lines. Chop. Flash. Vaporize. Step forward two feet. Chop. Flash. Vitrify.
He treated the slope like four hundred square meters of raw foundation pad. Where granite humps rose three inches above baseline zero, he slammed the white-hot blade into rock until silica boiled off in white vapor. Where dirt dipped below grade, he dragged molten slag flat with the hoe's back, screeding the fiery sludge like wet cement to an absolute tolerance of zero point zero degrees.
Every twenty minutes, he dropped onto one knee, closed his left eye, and sighted along the deck toward the horizon.
"Crown's gone. Valley's gone," he muttered, dusting ash from his knuckles. "Drainage pitch running dead flat. We'll cut an apron trench along the outer rim later for runoff, but the pad itself is true."
By noon, Sunset Peak's front yard wasn't an earthen slope anymore.
It was a four-hundred-square-meter plaza of solid, polished black obsidian, gleaming like dark water under the noon sun. Every outer perimeter edge was squared off at exactly ninety degrees. Zero stray pebbles. Zero weed roots. Clean as fresh-milled slate.
Austin wiped sweat from his eyebrows with a hemp sleeve. Looking down at his reflection in the glassy mirror, he felt a profound, calm satisfaction wash through his chest.
"Now that's a proper subgrade," he breathed, letting out a satisfied grunt. "Zero clipping. Zero seam tears. Trued up on the world axes."
A clean mechanical chime chimed in his head.
Austin clicked on the floating blueprint icon. "A stone well. Primitive hydraulics, but it beats hauling buckets up from the creek. Still, no PVC pipe or a submersible pump? We're gonna have to build the whole industrial supply chain from dirt."
***
Meanwhile, three miles down the ridge path, young Li Xiaoyao was having the worst morning of his sixteen years.
Li Xiaoyao was built like a willow switch, with a bottom-tier pseudo-spiritual root that barely kept him in the faded grey linen robes of an outer disciple. No rich clan behind him to grease the wheels. No silver taels to bribe the sect stewards. In the Clear Sky Sect, that meant you got handed every miserable, spine-snapping chore on the roster.
Today's job: haul the monthly grain sack up to Sunset Peak.
"Ancestors preserve me," Li Xiaoyao wheezed, hitching the heavy hemp sack higher on his bruised collarbone as his straw sandals scraped up the crumbling stone stairs. The rough rope handles dug into his shoulders like dull iron hooks. "They say Senior Brother Chu lost his mind from spiritual cold months back. If he's already stiff on the floorboards, Steward Wang will dock my pay two coppers for a cheap pine box..."
He paused on an outcrop of crumbly limestone to scrub salty sweat out of his stinging eyes. His thin chest heaved like a blacksmith's bellows.
Then the hair on his forearms stood straight up.
Something was dead wrong.
As you climbed Sunset Peak, the air was supposed to bite. Folks called it the 'Freezing Ridge' for good reason—rattling drafts and rime that could freeze spit before it hit shale. But over the last five hundred paces, the temperature had been climbing like a runaway forge.
By the final hairpin bend, the breeze felt like the exhaust draft of a master weaponsmith's furnace. The mountain mist had vanished—burned out of the sky, replaced by heat mirages twisting stunted pines into corkscrews.
And the smell.
Not scrub pine or wet rock. Lightning. The sharp, copper-penny tang of raw, unshielded heavenly ozone.
*Gulp.*
Li Xiaoyao swallowed dry spit. His knees began to knock together.
*Did a rank-six Fire Beast build a den up here?* panic shrieked in his skull. *Or has a demon sect elder come to butcher the outer peaks?!*
He dropped to his hands and knees, dragging the sack behind him. He crawled the last twenty paces to the smoking, charred stubs of the old bamboo gate.
He peeked through the broken pickets.
The breath hitched in his throat. His jaw went slack.
The weed-choked mud pit he remembered from autumn was gone. In its place stretched a pitch-black expanse of void-stone. The impossible, mirror-slick slab sat dead flat and pitch black. It looked like a hole torn straight into the earth's belly.
And right in the dead center stood Chu Yuan.
He wore the same frayed grey rags as any starved outer disciple, but the air around his shoulders was rippling like water under crushing gravity. In his right hand rested an ordinary iron hoe—yet Li Xiaoyao's spiritual perception screamed in blinding agony just glancing at it.
The blade glowed pearlescent white, humming with the contained fury of a dying sun. To Li Xiaoyao's terrified senses, that was no farm tool.
That was a Heaven-Sundering Ancient Halberd, forged from the core of a collapsed star!
*He's no cripple!* Li Xiaoyao's brain practically short-circuited. *The elders were blind! The testing basin was broken! Senior Brother Chu isn't trash—he's an ancient Ascendant Sovereign cleansing his Dao heart in the mortal dust! He carved a nine-heavens soul-refining array straight into the mountain's granite spine!*
Terror made his toes twitch. A loose pebble rattled under his heel.
*Scritch.*
His wet straw sandal squeaked loudly against the pristine obsidian mirror.
Austin, admiring the completed well schematic on his HUD, turned around.
His eyes locked onto Li Xiaoyao.
More precisely, Austin's eyes locked onto a sloppy, brown glob of mountain mud. Li Xiaoyao's left sandal had just plastered it across coordinate `[X: 14, Y: 08]` of his freshly leveled, zero-tolerance black floor.
A vein in Austin's temple pulsed like a hydraulic line under maximum pressure.
His eyes narrowed into terrifying slits of pure contractor fury.
"You," Austin said. His voice dropped to a low, gravelly monotone that sucked all the heat out of the air while his dantian sputtered with pressurized plasma. "Do you see a mud mat anywhere near that gate? Do you see a boot scraper by the threshold?"
Li Xiaoyao couldn't breathe. The spiritual pressure crushing down on his vertebrae felt like an entire mountain peak dropped onto his shoulders.
"N-no, Senior..." Li Xiaoyao squeaked, his voice cracking into a high, wheezing whine.
"No? Then why in God's name are your dirty clodhoppers tracking wet clay across a finished slab?" Austin took a heavy step forward. The glowing blue hoe swung lightly in his right fist. "Do you have any idea how long it took me to flatten that voxel grid? I just spent four hours getting this grade down to zero point zero tolerance. And you waltz in here dragging six pounds of roadside slop across coordinate fourteen-eight!"
Li Xiaoyao's knees gave out. His kneecaps slammed into the black obsidian with a sickening crack that sent numbness shooting up his thighs.
*The Sovereign is gonna turn me to slag!* Li Xiaoyao shrieked behind his teeth, tears of existential dread washing tracks through the soot on his cheeks. *I muddied the sacred altar of the Ancient Solar Array! He'll burn my soul to cinder and erase my bloodline from the mortal ledger!*
"Senior Ancestor! Mercy!" Li Xiaoyao screamed, cracking his forehead against the stone like an iron mallet striking an anvil. "This disciple was blind! I failed to recognize Mount Tai! I defiled the Sacred Altar! Have mercy on my worthless bones! Spare this worm's life!"
Austin blinked.
He lowered the hoe an inch. He stared down at the teenager on the ground. The kid had dropped his burlap sack and was slamming his skull into the obsidian every three seconds, shouting archaic melodrama.
"Great," Austin muttered, scratching behind his ear with the hoe haft. "Not only is the terrain physics bugged, but NPC pathfinding is totally broken. Guy hits a collision boundary, drops his delivery item, and locks into an infinite looping dialogue glitch. This game shouldn't have left closed alpha."