*FZZZZZZZZT.*
The twenty corpse-venom arrows never touched the bamboo dustpan.
Five inches out from Austin's canvas work apron, the invisible thermal boundary of his lower dantian caught them in full flight. Twenty-five thousand Kelvin does not negotiate with primitive ballistics.
The green swamp venom, boiled down over centuries from necrotic centipedes and corpse-flesh, flashed instantly into basic elemental nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and a faint whiff of scorched sulfur. The barbed iron tips bypassed liquid metal entirely, sublimating into a microscopic cloud of glowing iron gas. By the time the seasoned ironwood shafts arrived, the heat sheared their cellulose into subatomic carbon ash.
The whole volley ceased to exist in less than two milliseconds.
A lukewarm sprinkle of dull orange embers drifted out of the dead air, settling gently into the flat belly of Austin's bamboo dustpan like spent pipe tobacco tapped from a bowl.
Austin tilted the pan sideways. The grey ash dumped into the wild scrub by his straw sandal. He let out a long, nasal exhale, shaking his head in sheer, professional disgust.
"Garbage velocity," Austin grumbled, wiping a thumb across his grease-stained apron. "Sub-ninety meters a second. Massive aerodynamic drag, heavy yaw wobble on release, zero compensation for the thermal draft rolling off the gorge. You couldn't punch through half-inch sheetrock with that kind of sloppy spread. Who balanced the flight physics on these mobs? A first-year intern?"
Up on the foredeck of the seventy-foot war skiff, Captain Sha Yan’s scarred jaw dropped so hard his lower teeth clicked against his iron chin-strap. He staggered backward two paces, his boots slipping on betel spit, his spine hitting the mainmast with a dull, hollow *thud*.
"Corpse... Corpse-Piercing Arrows..." Sha Yan stammered, his fingers turning white on the leather hilt of his scimitar. "Twenty rank-three armor-shredders... caught in a dustpan like kitchen dust?! What kind of high-grade immortal ward is that peasant sitting on?!"
Austin didn't bother looking up to answer.
He dug his right hand deep into the front pouch of his canvas work apron. His calloused fingers rooted around through three bent framing nails, a stub of soapstone chalk chewed down to the knuckle, an oiled leather washer, and a brass plumb bob before settling on a smooth, oval basalt river pebble about the size of a walnut.
He had fished it out of the creek bed down below before breakfast. Nice, tight volcanic grain. Symmetrical weight. Good, honest density. He'd kept it in his pocket intending to use it as a leveling shim beneath the corner footing of the new tool shed, but right now, the local airspace took priority.
Austin pinched the smooth grey stone between his thumb and index finger.
A quick mental flick brought up the dev console behind his eyelids, the amber text rendering in crisp, glowing monospace:
"Hit yes," Austin muttered under his breath. "Clear the flight path. I’ve got two beds of Nantes carrots waiting on seed and the sun won't wait for these clowns."
Down in the boiler room of his lower dantian, the miniature sapphire sun surged.
A hair-thin filament of unshielded thermonuclear fire raced up the radial bone of his right forearm. It slid through his flesh without scorching a single skin cell, dumping its entire thermal load directly into the basalt pebble pinched between his calloused fingers.
The stone didn't just glow red.
It flashed into a blinding bead of pure sapphire-white star-stuff. The sudden radiance drowned out the noon sun, casting razor-sharp, pitch-black shadows across the mountain slopes. The air within three feet of Austin's knuckles collapsed in a violent, ear-popping vacuum snap that pulled the hair on his forearms straight toward his fist.
Austin cocked his wrist back an inch.
No flowery martial arts stance. No chanting nine-word immortal sutras. Just the easy, lazy flick of a tired boy skipping a flat stone across an irrigation pond on a hot July afternoon.
*THWIP.*
*BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!*
The hypersonic boom went off like a stick of dynamite inside an iron culvert.
A violent, cone-shaped shockwave ripped outward from the tip of Austin’s thumb. The blast wave leveled the wild clover for fifty yards in every direction, kicking up a blinding rooster-tail of dust and sending the two hundred Clear Sky survivors tumbling across the dirt like dry tumbleweeds.
The superheated river stone punched through the atmosphere at eight thousand five hundred meters a second—Mach 25 on the nose. A pencil-thin tunnel of glowing, vacuum-sheared plasma cut through the sky, burning purple afterimages onto the retinas of every cultivator on the ridge.
The forty-five-gram pebble hit Captain Sha Yan’s armored war skiff dead center in the iron keel.
Forty-five grams at Mach 25, carrying twenty-five thousand Kelvin of thermonuclear energy, delivers more raw kinetic destruction than a broadside of naval artillery.
*CRACK-BOOOOOOM!*
The seventy-foot war vessel didn't split or splinter. It suffered instantaneous molecular rupture.
The ironwood hull, the boiler rooms, the bronze ballistas, and all sixty demonic raiders flashed into a blinding, expanding fireball of vaporized iron, burning ozone, and white-hot ash. The shockwave tore outwards at supersonic speed, catching the two trailing war skiffs cruising fifty yards behind in defensive echelon.
Their masts snapped like dry twigs. Their wooden hulls crumpled inwards under the atmospheric wall like stepped-on eggshells, and both crippled hulls plunged out of the sky in spinning, flaming wreckage, cartwheeling down into the deep granite ravines with muffled, shuddering crunches.
Then came the silence.
Dead, heavy silence.
A soft, grey drift of cooling wood ash and microscopic iron dust drifted down through the quiet air, settling over the pine boughs and the obsidian courtyard like a light dusting of summer flour.
Over in the scrub weed, two hundred Clear Sky disciples and sixty Foundation elders stayed flat on their stomachs. Nobody moved. Nobody breathed. Disciples had their noses buried in the moss, fingers hooked into dirt. They stared with wide, bloodshot eyes at the clean blue patch of sky where three war vessels had been hovering two seconds ago.
Gu Qing’s forehead was pressed flat against the wild clover, his fingers clawing deep into the turf. He was shivering like a wet dog, the last dregs of his four-hundred-year-old Dao heart ground into fine powder.
"The Laws of Heaven..." Gu Qing choked out, his voice a dry, ragged rasp that barely carried three feet. "No talisman... no incantation... no grand seal... He reached into his pocket, flicked a garden pebble, and wiped an entire battle fleet off the face of the earth..."
Beside him, Chief Elder Zhao reached up with a numb, shaking hand to touch his own collarbone. For thirty years he had preached sect regulations, iron discipline, and the supreme authority of martial strength. Now, staring at the empty blue sky, he understood the truth: to the entity standing on that porch, whole sects, immortal lineages, and ancient alliances were nothing more than ants wandering across a blueprints table.
Li Xiaoyao stood at the courtyard margin, tears leaking down his dusty cheeks. He gripped his frayed bamboo broom with both hands, nodding in fierce, religious reverence:
*The Supreme Plain Dao... The Master needs no divine blades forged in the celestial heavens. A dustpan swallows a storm of cursed arrows. A single river stone erases the vanguard of the dark sea. This is the Dao of Zero Tolerance!*
Elder Mu Chen sat flat on his tailbone in the grass, his jaw hanging so low his singed beard swept the weeds:
"A river pebble..." Mu Chen wheezed, his Dao soul ready to float right out of his ribs. "A common, muddy river stone from the ditch... He threw a pebble, and three flying dreadnoughts ceased to exist in the memory of heaven and earth..."
On the edge of the obsidian court, Austin gave his right hand a loose, fluid shake to snap off the residual static cling.
He blew a thin, delicate wisp of blue ozone off the calloused tip of his thumb, then wiped his hand down the front of his canvas apron.
*PING.*
A golden chime rang directly behind his ears, accompanied by a bright waterfall of amber system text:
Austin took a slow, deep breath.
Deep within his dantian, the sapphire core settled into a heavier, denser gravitational rhythm. The internal weight was immense. The core mass spiked to 0.0001 lunar masses—over seven quintillion kilograms of condensed matter spinning behind his navel—yet the internal magnetic containment held it rock-solid, centered like a massive flywheel in a hydroelectric turbine. It felt solid. Substantial. Like dropping a thousand-pound anvil onto a reinforced concrete footing.
His shoulders broadened slightly. The ache in his lower back from two days of shoveling gravel evaporated into cool, golden vitality.
"Level fifteen," Austin chuckled, reading through the floating blueprint wireframe with professional delight. "An automated subterranean mining quarry! Finally! No more breaking my back with a hand pick against surface ledge. I can sink a vertical shaft straight down into the bedrock, run automatic piston crushers, and start stockpiling dimension stone for proper retaining walls!"
He admired the wireframe schematic. It laid out a thirty-meter vertical elevator shaft, gravity chutes, conveyor feeds, and rotary rock breakers. Real, honest industrial engineering. The kind of setup that could turn raw mountain ledge into clean, stacked building blocks while a man ate his dinner in peace.
Before he could take two steps toward the tool bench to check the plasma pick schematic, an ear-splitting, sky-rending roar of ancient rage tore through the cloud deck.
**"WHO DARES BUTCHER MY VANGUARD?!"**
The blue sky above the Southern Cloud Mountains turned the color of clotted, rotting blood.
Tearing through the thunderheads like a leviathan breaching a dark ocean, the massive, three-hundred-foot **Nether-Dragon Flagship** descended into the gorge!
Mounted upon its draconic prow, burning with sickening crimson power, the thirty-foot barrel of the **Nine-Nether Blood River Annihilation Cannon** aimed straight down the throat of Sunset Peak—and standing atop the fossilized dragon skull, his scarlet robes whipping with the shrieking souls of ten thousand butchered cultivators, was Patriarch Nether-Ghost himself!