In the center of the Grand Martial Arena, the air warped like hot glass over an open blast furnace.
Standing beside the thirty-foot conical mound of pulverized black obsidian sand, Austin felt the familiar, heavy thrum of astrophysics rattling through the bedrock of his dantian.
The hypersonic kinetic energy from that acoustic tap hadn't dissipated into thin air. It had cycled straight back through the tool steel, down his forearms, and deep into the White Dwarf Seed nestled in his lower abdomen. Inside that microscopic core, degenerate electron gas compressed into an even narrower Fermi sphere, holding off gravitational collapse through sheer quantum exclusion pressure. Around it, the First Epoch containment field hummed like a magnetic confinement tokamak, glowing with cold celestial radiation.
*DING.*
A clear chime echoed behind his eyes, snapping an amber-and-blue diagnostic readout across his retinas:
Inside his dantian, the pearl-sized seed shrank by another twelve percent, packing dense stellar matter into a tighter sphere.
Core surface temperature climbed to two hundred thousand Kelvin. It blazed with a blinding white glare that would have vaporized a mountain range had it been unleashed naked into the atmosphere.
The First Epoch containment mesh held ninety-nine point nine nine eight percent of that cosmic horror locked behind quantum seals. But that microscopic zero point zero zero two percent thermal-gravitational leakage stopped behaving like a gentle five-gravity ripple.
The perimeter snapped straight to **Eight Times Earth Gravity**.
*CRACK-THUD!*
An invisible hydraulic piston of curved spacetime smashed down across a fifty-meter circle of the arena floor.
Atmospheric pressure spiked. The air thickened into a heavy, metallic soup smelling of ionized ozone and copper filings.
The loose basalt sand didn't blow away.
Billions of coarse silica grains were driven downward with such violent, uniform force that the arena floor settled two full inches in a fraction of a heartbeat. Under that brutal mechanical compaction, the top crust fused into a glassy, rock-hard sheet of vitreous sandstone.
Twenty paces away, Young Master Huo Yun was still staring at the mound of black obsidian dust with his mouth open.
He never saw the punch coming.
*SPLAT!*
An invisible freight car dropped onto his spine.
Huo Yun’s knees kicked out sideways. His elbows buckled. His ribs smacked into the vitrified stone with a sickening, wet crunch that drove the air clean out of his chest. His nose squashed flat against the fused sandstone, twin jets of dark arterial blood squirting into the grit.
Three feet away, his mid-tier Earth-Grade Blazing Dragon Sword groaned under its own multiplied mass.
The three-foot steel blade suddenly weighed nearly three hundred pounds. The internal crystalline structure gave out under the lopsided gravitational shear:
*SNAP.*
The prized clan blade fractured cleanly into three pieces. Above the hilt, the thirty-foot phantom of the crimson fire dragon was flattened like an earthworm under a steamroller, sputtering out in greasy grey smoke.
Ten paces back, Arbiter Tie dropped straight onto all fours.
The Peak Golden Core war veteran dug his iron gauntlets into the sandstone, biceps knotting like iron burls as he fought to keep his breastplate off the dirt. His eyes bulged, the whites veined in crimson. His tongue hung from the corner of his lips, saliva dripping onto his knuckles:
*G-GRAVITATIONAL DISPLACEMENT?!* Tie screamed within his soul. *EIGHT-FOLD CELESTIAL DRAG! My Golden Core is groaning at the seams! The air feels like molten pig iron! What kind of primeval mountain titan is standing in this ring?!*
Fifty feet overhead, in the Supreme Royal Gallery, Provincial Governor Zhao’s jade teacup crumbled to powder between his fingers.
The white spirit-jade balustrade creaked under the shifting gravitational gradient, hairline fractures zipping through the polished handrails. Half a dozen royal councilors grabbed their bellies, their inner ears spinning in sudden, violent motion sickness as localized gravity tugged at their boots.
Down in the pit, Austin lifted his right boot to take a step forward.
*Clomp.*
The boot came down heavy. Austin lifted his left foot, feeling an awkward, sluggish drag pulling against his quads and hamstrings.
He stopped, scowling down at his thighs in deep technical irritation.
"Terrific," Austin grumbled, rolling his shoulders with an annoyed grunt. "Movement desync. Eight point two percent inertia penalty. Every time a developer hosts a live festival event with over ten thousand concurrent players in one zone, the physics tick rate goes straight out the window. Server lag is tanking my client performance. Feels like dragging hip waders through half-cured wet cement."
He unbuckled the top strap of his canvas rucksack, rummaging through his hardware bins.
His calloused fingers came back out with a heavy round brass tin. Inside were sixteen oversized lead balance washers and four heavy threaded steel pipe nipples—spare ballast hardware he had turned on the lathe to balance the Pelton turbine runner back on Sunset Peak.
Austin unclipped his tool belt by a notch.
He slipped eight lead washers into his left front dungaree pocket, and eight into his right, balancing the dead weight with practiced mechanical symmetry.
He patted his thighs: *Clack, clack.*
"Right," Austin said, doing a quick, bouncing heel-drop to test his center of mass. "Proper counterweight ballast. That'll smooth out the angular momentum, offset the moment arm, and kill the rubber-banding through the corners. Always balance your rotating assembly, boys."
He scooped his five-foot, iridescent blue Stellar-Steel pipe wrench back onto his shoulder.
With his stride restored to a steady, rhythmic contractor pace, Austin strolled over to Arbiter Tie.
The scarred Golden Core veteran was still pinned to the sand, trembling on all fours. Blood dripped from his nose into his iron collar. He stared up at Austin in pure, white-eyed terror, like a man who had just realized the mountain beneath his boots was an active volcano.
Austin reached behind his right ear, pulling out his yellow lumber grease pencil.
He leaned down and tapped Arbiter Tie’s scarred iron pauldron with the blunt end of the pencil:
*Tap, tap.*
"Excuse me, sir," Austin asked, his contractor drawl quiet, level, and entirely unfazed by eight gravities. "About the preliminary round. Does turning the test monolith into thirty yards of aggregate sand secure my seed in the bracket, or do you boys have another one crated up in the equipment shed?"
Arbiter Tie stared at the blunt yellow pencil resting on his shoulder.
His eyes tracked downward to Austin’s steel-toed boots.
Down there, twelve grey river pebbles and thirty dried pine needles were spinning in shrieking, hyper-velocity orbits under the eight-gravity gradient, whistling through the air like miniature diamond-edged sawblades.
Tie wheezed, pink foam bubbling at his lips as he forced words out through his compressed chest:
"Q-QUALIFIED... FIRST SEED! UNCONDITIONAL... TOURNAMENT SEED NUMBER ONE! PASS! YOU PASS! MERCY!"
Austin nodded, pleased to have the paperwork settled.
"Much obliged," Austin said, tucking the grease pencil behind his ear. "Good to keep the job records straight. Let me know when the opening round kicks off. I'm going back up to the gallery to finish my tea."
He pivoted on his heel and headed toward the pit stairs: *Clomp, clomp, clomp.*
As Austin climbed out of the combat floor, the eight-gravity field moved with him, peeling off the arena floor like an ebbing tide.
The crushing weight vanished in an instant.
Arbiter Tie collapsed flat onto his belly, gasping for breath like a beached river carp, his heavy black lamellar plates soaked through with cold, greasy sweat.
Twenty yards back, Young Master Huo Yun slowly peeled his bloody nose off the fused sandstone.
He looked down at his ruined Blazing Dragon Sword, broken into three jagged shards of dead metal. He looked up at the blue-denim back climbing the royal steps.
Tears of humiliated, aristocratic madness burned Huo Yun’s eyes like lye.
*He didn't even look at me!* Huo Yun’s mind screamed, his teeth grinding until chips of enamel cracked. *He turned the sacred imperial obelisk to sand... smashed me into the dirt without drawing a weapon... and asked if he passed the paperwork check!*
Huo Yun shoved a trembling hand inside his blood-streaked scarlet robe, his fingers locking onto an ancient, cold black bone talisman carved with three weeping skull glyphs:
*In the arena duel... I'll ignite my ancient dragon marrow! I'll rip that inverted washbasin off your skull and burn your soul to cinders in the Nether Furnace!*
Up on the royal gallery landing, Austin stepped back through the curtain.
Li Xiaoyao scrambled forward, offering a warm, damp cotton rag with both hands. "Patriarch! The imperial elders are struck dumb! To turn the ancient obelisk to dust with a mere acoustic rap of the Sacred Spanner—it is a legend that will echo across the provinces for ten thousand years!"
"It wasn't a legend, Xiaoyao," Austin said, using the cloth to wipe a smear of black silica dust off his tool belt’s brass buckle. "It was harmonic resonance in an un-annealed amorphous solid. You hit brittle glass at its fundamental frequency, the internal mechanical damping drops to zero. That's why every pressure vessel we fabricate on Sunset Peak has to be normalized in a heat-treating furnace. You don't relieve that internal stress, a cold breeze will snap your boiler in half."
Xiaoyao nodded with furious devotion, jotting down every word in his pocket ledger like it was imperial canon.
Austin sank back into the rosewood armchair, propping his boots back up onto the mahogany footstool. Pug cracked one eye, gave Austin’s knee a warm snort, and went back to snoring against the tiger rug.
"All right," Austin muttered, checking his system quest log. "Bracket locked in. First duel starts in thirty minutes. Just enough time to steep another thermos of tea and check the clearance tolerances on those hydraulic pump seals."