The arena cleanup took forty minutes longer than the heralds promised. Down in the sunken caldera, four squads of imperial earth-shapers were still scraping the scorched slurry of Young Master Huo Yun off the flagstones with bronze shovels, dumping the slag into cedar wheelbarrows while alchemical trowel-men patched the gouged pit floor.
Austin leaned his forearms against the cool white jade of the royal balustrade, squinting through the midday heat shimmer. He had a yellow grease pencil tucked behind his ear and an oily thumbprint smudged across the bridge of his work spectacles.
"Look at that float work," he muttered, shaking his head with a tired grimace. "They're skimming wet mortar right over a glazed, fire-hardened substrate without roughing it up first. Zero scarification. No mechanical key whatsoever. Give it three weeks of foot traffic and that top coat's gonna flake off like stale cornflakes under dragging friction. Pure municipal hack work."
Li Xiaoyao knelt beside the rosewood tea cart, carefully slicing strips of hickory-smoked spirit beef with a clean utility knife. "Master observes the secret flaws in all worldly foundations. Truly, the divine gaze of the Master Builder pierces every mortal illusion."
"I don't need a divine gaze to spot bad masonry, Xiaoyao. I just have eyes. When you slap a half-inch skim of lime on an unscratched bed, it delaminates. My uncle Dale did that on a patio in ninety-eight. Whole slab popped loose after the first hard freeze."
Down on the stone tiers, two hundred and fifty thousand spectators were beginning to rumble. The afternoon sun beat down like an open furnace door, baking the rock until the air tasted of sulfur and sweat. To keep the restless crowd from pelting the box seats with dried rinds, the master of ceremonies hurried to the announcer’s rostrum, signaling the heralds.
A deafening blast from four twelve-foot bronze horns echoed off the caldera rim.
"NOBLE LORDS, HONORED CULTIVATORS, AND CITIZENS OF THE GREAT YAN!" the herald's magically amplified roar rolled across the stands. "BEHOLD THE IMPERIAL BEAST EXHIBITION! DIRECT FROM THE FROZEN TRENCHES OF THE NORTHERN ABYSS—A FIFTY-TON CALAMITY OF PRIMEVAL CARNAGE! CAPTURED AT THE COST OF THREE ELDERS' MERIDIANS! THE SCOURGE OF SEVEN BORDER VALLEYS!"
Deep beneath the northern grandstands, heavy counterweighted chains began to rattle through grease-starved iron pulleys. A heavy portcullis groaned upward, iron teeth grinding against granite tracks.
Twenty imperial beast tamers marched into the pit, their boots crunching on the fresh sand. Every man was strapped into spiked cold-iron plate, bracing eight-foot polearms tipped with crackling blue lightning runes. Between them rolled a massive iron wagon carrying a cage built from three-inch solid dark-iron bar stock.
Riding the cage roof was Chief Beast Master Yan, brandishing a nine-ringed dragon-taming whip that threw violet sparks with every flick of his wrist.
"UNLEASH THE ABYSSAL EARTH-WYRM!" Yan bellowed, lashing his whip across the hydraulic release trigger.
*CLANG-SCREEECH!*
The four faceplates of the cage dropped outward with a ground-jarring thud.
A suffocating stench rolled into the arena—the sour, rotting reek of stagnant bog gas, sulfuric bile, and ancient meat. Out from the iron box slid eighty feet of thick, muscular, primeval nightmare.
The **Ancient Mountain-Devouring Earth-Wyrm** was built like a subterranean locomotive. Interlocking plates of midnight-black obsidian scales armored its bulk from snout to tail. Four bone-white horns jutted from its flattened brow, crackling with emerald static. As its maw parted, rows of recurved fangs dripped green acid that sizzled against the pavers, throwing up plumes of caustic vapor.
*ROOOOOOOOOOOOAAAR!*
The wyrm’s bellow was a physical blow. The concussive wave of low-frequency sound vibrated through the stone balustrades, rattling the porcelain tea service on Austin's table. In the lower bleachers, half a dozen mortal attendants dropped like lead weights, fainting dead away from the sheer, nauseating weight of the beast's spiritual pressure.
***
Up in the Supreme Imperial Royal Gallery, the air smelled entirely different: rich, woodsy hickory smoke and dried beef.
Austin sat back in his velvet armchair, idly chewing a strip of jerky while he cross-referenced a page of notes on pump displacement. Beside his left boot, Cerberus Pug stirred.
The eight-hundred-pound Three-Headed Nether-Solar Cerberus cracked open six glowing ruby eyes.
His six triangular black ears twitched toward the pit, rotating like small radar dishes. The dog pushed his front end up, stretching his spine with a long, rumbling canine yawn that revealed three sets of pearlescent, star-forged fangs. He ambled over to the carved white jade balustrade with the heavy, unhurried gait of an oversized mastiff, propping two saucer-sized paws right on the polished coping stone.
Pug's left head cocked forty-five degrees to the left.
Pug's right head cocked forty-five degrees to the right.
The middle head drew in a long, noisy sniff of the rising acid fumes, wrinkled its black jowls, and let out a wet, inquisitive snort: *Hnff?*
Down below, the eighty-foot calamity beast hissed, thrashing its armored tail against the sand, sending stone fragments whistling into the arena walls.
To the imperial court, to the terrified grandmasters, to every cultivator shivering in the bleachers, that monster was a living siege engine capable of swallowing an armored infantry company whole.
To an eight-hundred-pound cosmic hound whose belly processed white dwarf stellar fusion...
That long, scaly, rubbery thing wriggling down in the dirt looked like an absolute dream toy.
Pug's three tails, bushy and tipped with crackling tufts of violet static, began to wag.
*THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.*
The tails hammered against the carved jade pilasters like pneumatic tampers, shaking loose a fine powder of white marble dust that drifted onto the governor’s silk runner.
Austin glanced over his shoulder. "What're you staring at, boy?"
Pug looked back over his shoulder. All three heads whined in three-part harmony—a desperate, high-pitched plea for permission, eyes wide and begging.
Austin squinted down into the pit, taking in the thrashing green serpent, then looked back at his dog.
"You see a stick?" Austin reached into his pocket and tossed Pug the butt-end of a jerky strip. Pug's right head caught it out of the air with an audible snap. "Go get it if you want. But wipe your paws before you come back inside. I'm not listening to the Governor whine about mud stains on his imported weave."
That was the only green light the hound needed.
With an eager, rumbling *WOOF* that rattled the crystal chandeliers in the ceiling, Pug launched.
He didn't bother using the stairs. He cleared the four-foot balustrade in a single, effortless bound, sailing out over the open drop like an eight-hundred-pound lump of black iron.
*KABOOOOOOOM!*
The dog slammed into the dead center of the pit floor fifty feet below, throwing up a thirty-foot rooster-tail of sand and shattered lime mortar.
Chief Beast Master Yan nearly dropped his whip, clutching the cage railing as his knees turned to tallow: "WHAT IN THE NINE HELLS IS THAT?! WHO LET AN UNREGISTERED THREE-HEADED WAR-HOG DUMP INTO THE ROYAL EXHIBIT?!"
The eighty-foot Earth-Wyrm recoiled, its four bone horns sparking with emerald venom. Deep-trench predators rarely had eight-hundred-pound projectiles drop out of the clear sky straight into their feeding pen. Its yellow slit-pupils focused on the black beast standing in the dust crater. The serpent reared back, its throat swelling like an accordion, and spewed twenty gallons of concentrated emerald acid right into Pug's face.
*HISSSSSSSSSSSSS!*
The corrosive jet struck like a fire hose, enveloping the center of the arena in a blinding cloud of boiling green vapor. The acidic mist chewed through the flagstones, dissolving mortar joints into foamy paste.
Spectators gasped, several elders turning their faces away, expecting to see a heap of dissolved skeleton.
From the middle of the green cloud came a loud, familiar sound:
*FLAP-FLAP-FLAP-FLAP.*
Pug gave himself a vigorous, full-body dog shake.
The emerald acid, engineered to dissolve high-carbon steel in four seconds flat, simply sheeted off his obsidian fur like tap water off a freshly ceramic-coated truck hood. The celestial hair follicles didn't even singe. If anything, the acid wash cleaned away a layer of dust from the kennel floor, leaving the hound's coat gleaming with a deep, oily gloss and smelling distinctly of fresh wintergreen.
Pug didn't care about the acid. Pug cared about the stick.
His six ruby eyes locked onto the broad, horned skull swaying ten feet above the sand.
*Pant, pant, pant.*
*IT'S A TOY THAT MOVES ON ITS OWN!*
Pug charged.
He crossed thirty yards before the giant reptile could even close its dripping jaws.
All three heads hit their marks with mechanical synchronization.
*CHOMP. CHOMP. CHOMP.*
Pug's left jaws locked around the wyrm's right horn. His right jaws locked around the wyrm's left horn. And his center head clamped straight down on the scaly nape of the beast's neck, applying roughly twenty million pounds of hydraulic jaw pressure.
*SQUEEEEEEEEE-K!*
The terrifying Mountain-Devouring Earth-Wyrm—the five-century scourge of the northern provinces—let out a shrill, suffocated peep like a stepped-on chew toy.
Then Pug went to work.
Every terrier from the Hudson River to the Yangzi Basin shared one ancient, sacred tradition:
**The Death Shake.**
Pug braced his front claws into the arena substrate, set his haunches, and whipped all three heads from side to side at fifty cycles per second.
*WHIP-WHIP-WHIP-WHIP-FLAP-FLAP-FLAP!*
The eighty-foot dragon was transformed into a green garden hose flapping in a hurricane.
Its eyes rolled into its skull. Its long purple tongue flapped out of its mouth, spraying saliva across the first ten rows of the grandstands. Its internal organs sloshed into porridge, and its obsidian scales clattered against one another like an open toolbox tumbling down a fire escape.
*“Mercy!”* the wyrm’s ancient, reptilian beast-soul shrieked across the spiritual plane in sobbing despair. *“Ancestral Heavens, make the big puppy stop!”*
After about fifteen seconds of furious shaking, Pug paused. He let go of the horns. The dragon collapsed into the sand like a heap of wet laundry, its tongue twitching, completely limp.
Pug gave it an exploratory poke with his front paw.
*Squish.*
Satisfied that the stick was properly tenderized, Pug clamped his middle jaws around the midpoint of the serpent's eighty-foot body. With a proud heave of his thick neck, he slung the limp, groaning bulk over his shoulders like an enormous emerald noodle, turned around, and trotted toward the royal stairs.
*Clack-clack-clack-clack.*
His heavy claws clicked merrily against the polished marble treads. Up the hundred steps he bounded, his three tails wagging in sweeping arcs that wiped dust off the banisters. At the top landing, he shoved the gilded double doors open with his wet nose.
*THUD-SPLAT.*
Pug dropped the limp, cross-eyed, twitching eighty-foot Earth-Wyrm directly onto the imperial silk carpet, neatly draping its bruised neck across the steel caps of Austin's work boots.
The ancient terror of seven provinces let out a faint, gurgling wheeze: *...hurk.*
Pug sat down on his haunches with a heavy thump, all three pink tongues lolling out, panting happily as six red eyes stared up at Austin:
*Pant, pant, pant! Look what I brought! Rub my ears!*
Austin looked down at the eighty feet of primeval dragon twitching against his boot leather.
He reached into his pocket, drew his brass pocket gauge, and measured the thickness of an obsidian ridge near the beast’s jawline. He tapped the scale with the eraser of his grease pencil, listening to the dull, dense *thwack*.
He reached over and scratched Pug’s center head right between the ears, giving the left and right jowls a hearty rub.
"Good boy, Pug," Austin said, nodding with genuine satisfaction. "Now that's a sturdy fetch stick. Solid tensile strength, high tear resistance, zero surface cracks. If the supply wagons get mired in the spring thaw, we can braid this into an emergency fifty-ton snatch strap. Beats buying chain from the smithy."
Austin fished another thick strip of beef jerky out of his bento box and tossed it over. Pug snapped it out of the air in one bite: *GULP.*
Along the rear wall of the royal box, Provincial Governor Zhao, Grandmaster Ouyang, and twenty imperial ministers were pinned flat against the carved cedar paneling. Their knuckles were bloodless, their jaws slack, their silk robes soaked through with cold, oily sweat.
Nobody moved. Nobody breathed.
They simply stared at the five-hundred-year-old Calamity Dragon lying limp on the carpet, serving as a footrest for an eighteen-year-old kid in faded denim overalls.