Ten thousand flying spiritual swords hung suspended in the freezing sky above Canglan Citadel, blotting out the midday sun like an endless ceiling of diamond-honed cold iron.
Four centuries of solitary labor in the frost pools of the Northern Marches had forged them. Every blade had been quenched in subterranean glacial brine, tempered over spirit fires, and honed down to the thickness of a grease pencil mark. Each one hummed at a screeching, supersonic pitch, vibrating with the razor-edged intent of a Half-Step Nascent Soul sovereign. The combined acoustic shriek slammed into the city below, shattering decorative lanterns, cracking stained-glass clerestory windows, and peeling glazed ceramic roof tiles off every pagoda within three miles of the colosseum.
Two hundred thousand spectators dropped under the stone benches, clamping bleeding ears and groaning into the flagstones.
Up in the teeth of the blizzard, Jiang Taixu’s crane-feather robes snapped like canvas awnings in a gale. His gaunt face had hardened into pale limestone, eyes burning with the cold, aristocratic certainty of a master handing down an execution:
*"SWORD RAIN OF THE NINE VOIDS!"*
Jiang Taixu slammed both arms downward.
*"DISSOLVE HIS FLESH! ATOMIZE HIS CARPENTER TOOLS! BURY HIS ARROGANT SOUL IN A LAKE OF STEEL!"*
The sky tore open with a sound like a freight train jumping the tracks at full throttle.
Ten thousand silver blades plunged simultaneously from the stratosphere.
They fell in a tight, helical wedge at three times the speed of sound. Supersonic shockwaves and violent ribbons of ionized sword-aura ripped the atmosphere into boiling ropes of white vapor. The descending mass carried enough raw kinetic momentum to punch clean through the mountain’s bedrock foundation and pancake an entire walled district before the dust could settle.
Down in the royal pavilion, Governor Zhao squeezed his eyes shut and dropped flat on the frosted silk carpet. *"It is over... the provincial capital is doomed... our ancestors have abandoned the tax rolls..."*
Grandmaster Ouyang lay belly-down right beside him, his beard mashed into the floorboards. "Ten thousand heaven-grade blades falling in unison! No mortal timber, no mountain bulwark, no spirit ward can take that kind of kinetic beating!"
On the Central Jade Dais, Austin didn’t move an inch.
He kept the forty-pound First Epoch server terminal tucked firmly under his left arm, nestled against his faded denim dungarees.
Beside him, Li Xiaoyao was panting like a winded hound, pupils blown wide. The kid instinctively hoisted Austin’s birch clipboard over his master’s blue hard hat like an umbrella, knees knocking together. "M-Master! The sky is falling! There’s ten thousand swords coming down! The clipboard ain't rated for ten thousand swords!"
"Xiaoyao, step behind the yellow hazard tape," Austin said calmly, nudging the boy back three feet with the steel toe of his boot. "And put the clipboard down before you catch a splinter in your eye."
At Austin’s feet, Cerberus Pug trotted across the cracked tiles, completely unfazed by the screaming sky. The dog’s three snub-nosed heads took turns sniffing an ornate, lacquered scabbard that had tumbled loose from the opening volley. The middle head clamped onto the brass throat of the sheath, the left head grabbed the sharkskin wrap, and all three stubby tail nubs whirled in frantic, happy circles as the pup began gnawing the leather to shreds.
Austin tilted his head back, peering through his grease-smudged work spectacles at the silver avalanche tearing down through the atmosphere.
As his gaze locked onto the screaming cloud, his gamer HUD hitched. A massive, obnoxious amber warning box slapped itself across his vision, pulsing with emergency diagnostic readouts:
Austin’s right eyelid began an angry, violent twitch.
His jaw set into the bitter, white-hot fury reserved exclusively for seasoned PC builders watching an unpatched, poorly coded disaster bring high-end hardware down to a crawl.
"Fourteen frames per second," Austin hissed under his breath, voice dripping with disgust. "Fourteen point two. Are you out of your goddamn mind?"
He stared straight up into the dive of the swarm, pointing the heavy nose of his wrench at the sky like an angry superintendent catching a rogue crew cutting live conduit:
"Ten thousand individually rendered polygon meshes?! Every single blade has its own dynamic lighting pass?! You put real-time ray-traced reflections on ten thousand cold-iron bevels?! And you slapped individual thick 3D smoke emitters on every single projectile?! Who wrote this render pipeline, a summer intern trying to melt the server rack?!"
The wind screamed down the chute of the colosseum, bringing the blades closer, but Austin’s contractor rant had already hit full operating speed:
"Where is your Level-of-Detail scaling?! Where is your occlusion culling?! You don't draw ten thousand high-poly assets inside the active viewport all at once, you sloppy butcher! You batch-instance them as flat 2D sprites until they hit fifty yards! My cooling fans are screaming at four thousand RPM, the physics tick rate just dropped off a cliff, and the entire skybox looks like a PowerPoint presentation! This is unplayable garbage!"
Austin shook his head, spitting a fleck of arena dust onto the stone.
"Unacceptable site conditions. Massive optical hazard, total waste of memory. I’m cleaning this junk off my screen right now."
He didn’t scramble for the arena bunkers. He didn’t pop an energy ward. He didn’t bother reaching for a defensive talisman.
Instead, Austin adjusted his grip on the **Five-Foot Stellar-Steel Pipe Wrench**. He hoisted the twenty-pound, iridescent blue tool, spun it ninety degrees until the serrated heel-jaw faced the ground, and planted the flat face of the hardened head firmly into the center of the jade dais.
*CLACK.*
No ancient incantations. No theatrical blood-spitting.
He cracked a microscopic valve—zero point zero zero zero one percent—between the dense metallic lattice of the pipe wrench and the **White Dwarf Seed** churning inside his lower dantian.
A white dwarf is a brutal cosmic dynamo. It spins at thousands of revolutions per second, packing the mass of an asteroid belt into degenerate matter and pumping out a magnetic field density north of **one hundred million Gauss**.
The second Austin grounded the Stellar-Steel tool into the arena sub-floor, that trapped planetary flux surged down the handle and erupted into the sky as a monstrous, invisible **Planetary Electromagnetic & Gravitational Induction Field**.
*BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ-VUMMMMMMM!*
A subterranean hum shuddered through the province’s tectonic bedrock, rattling teeth and making the soles of every spectator's boots vibrate against the stone.
The descending cloud of ten thousand flying swords was barely fifty yards above Austin’s hard hat. Cold-iron tips gleamed with murder, shrieking toward his skull.
Suddenly, every ferromagnetic blade—hammered from glacial cold-iron, celestial meteorite core, and star-iron alloy—slammed headfirst into a magnetic gradient of astronomical scale.
Massive Lorentz forces seized the crystal lattice of the steel.
Violent eddy currents rippled through every square inch of metal, superheating the blades and instantly scorching away the delicate soul-bonds Jiang Taixu had spent four centuries fusing into the iron. The Sword Saint’s proud spiritual intent peeled off the steel like cheap duct tape blasted by an industrial heat gun.
The ten thousand screaming blades jerked to a dead stop in mid-air.
Their downward trajectories bent hard along invisible magnetic flux lines. Shrieking steel folded into a tight, swirling silver funnel fifty feet above the pit floor.
Then, exactly like a bucket of drywall nails dumped near a five-hundred-ton industrial scrap magnet...
*SWOOSH-SLIDE-CLATTER-CLANG-CLANG-CRASH!*
All ten thousand swords plunged out of the sky in a single metallic heap.
They cleared Austin by a comfortable yard.
Every blade missed his denim dungarees, leaving his midnight-blue hard hat untouched and his server terminal safely cradled. Guided by the magnetic lines radiating from the grounded wrench head, all ten thousand swords tumbled into an orderly, thirty-foot conical pyramid of harmless scrap iron right on the arena sand.
*CLATTER-CLATTER-THUD.*
Three seconds. That was all it took to convert the apocalyptic sword armada of the legendary Southern Sword Saint into a neat woodpile of salvage stock.
Austin lifted the wrench, resting the blue handle back across his shoulder with an easy roll of his neck.
He looked up at the sky.
The frost clouds had broken. The sub-zero blizzard was gone. Warm, yellow afternoon light poured across the arena through clean, unobstructed blue air.
Austin glanced at his HUD.
Austin let out a long, satisfied breath through his teeth.
"There," he muttered, rolling his shoulders. "Sixty frames per second. Zero stutter. Camera pans like fresh butter. That's how an engine is supposed to run."
He stepped over to the scrap heap, kicking a loose hilt with his steel toe. "Forty-five metric tons of pre-cut Cold-Iron bar. Good carbon content, zero slag inclusions. Tie Kuang is gonna lose his mind when we dump this into the Floor Two smelting hoppers."
Down by his boots, Cerberus Pug trotted over to the base of the mountain of swords. The pup sniffed a fallen pommel, let out three happy, simultaneous snorts, and grabbed a loose leather scabbard strap between its right set of jaws, dragging it across the sand while all three tail nubs wagged like miniature propeller blades.
High above the dais, balancing on his single remaining broadsword, Jiang Taixu stared down at the thirty-foot pyramid of scrap.
The Sword Saint’s jaw hung slack.
His silver eyes wandered blindly over the pile. He tried to speak, but his tongue slapped uselessly against dry teeth.
Then an enormous plume of black, coagulated blood burst from Jiang Taixu’s throat, showering his pristine crane feathers in dark crimson gore.
*SPURT!*
The sudden whiplash of ten thousand soul-bonded blades getting violently stripped in three seconds tore through seventy percent of his meridian network. Deep inside his dantian, his four-hundred-year-old Peak Golden Core groaned under the shockwave, developing a jagged, hairline fracture clean across its equator.
"My... my blades..." Jiang Taixu wheezed, his voice breaking into a ragged, pitiful gasp. "Four centuries... hammered in the ice... stacked like scrap cordwood behind a barn..."
Before the reeling Sword Saint could slip from his sword, a deep tectonic vibration rose through the jade dais.
The forty-five tons of kinetic impact and magnetic flux absorbed by Austin’s wrench hadn't vanished into the dirt. Grounded through the tool, the entire surge shot straight up the handle, through Austin’s arm, and slammed directly into his core.
Deep within his dantian, the pearl-sized White Dwarf Seed drank down the kinetic influx. Crushed under the sudden spike in mass-energy, the degenerate electron lattice collapsed past its final theoretical density wall.
*DING.*
A clear tone, ringing like a billion steel anvils struck in unison, resonated through Austin's head.
The **Level 32 Chandrasekhar Breakthrough** had arrived.