With a wet peeling sound like butcher paper pulled off a cold brick wall, Southern Sword Saint Jiang Taixu lifted his face out of the arena sands.
His four-hundred-year-old snow-white crane robes hung in shredded, blood-caked tatters. Coarse yellow grit and crushed iron dust clung to his silver hair, and dark blood dripped from his swollen nose onto his collarbone.
Yet, peering up at Austin through blackened, swollen eyelids, the old sovereign showed no trace of bitterness, wounded pride, or thirst for revenge.
His eyes burned with the wild, unhinged devotion of a man who had just watched the master blueprint of the universe unroll before his face.
Jiang Taixu pulled his trembling knees beneath him.
He threw his entire torso down, smashing his forehead against the compacted sandstone with enough force to make the sub-floor ring like a five-ton bronze gong.
*CLANG!*
The pavers webbed with fresh cracks around his temples.
"Disciple Jiang Taixu thanks the Patriarch for shattering my four centuries of mortal blindness!" Jiang Taixu bawled, voice breaking into an open, ragged sob. Tears of absolute religious ecstasy cut clean pink furrows through the grit and soot on his cheeks. "For four hundred years, I thought the Sword was the supreme Dao of the cosmos! I was a crawling worm! A sword is just a blunt wedge of cold metal, built for nothing but crude butchery! But the Patriarch... the Patriarch’s divine wrench has revealed the True Law of Creation!"
He threw his head back and slammed it into the sand a second time:
*CLANG!*
"The Supreme Dao of Mechanical Leverage! The Fulcrum of the Heavens! The Divine Torque of the Stars!" Jiang Taixu cried, stretching trembling, bloodied hands toward Austin's steel-toed boots. "Master! Grand Architect of the Skies! Take this worthless old dog as your humble apprentice! Let me carry your blue spanner! Let me carry your grease bucket! Let me wrap Teflon tape around your threaded joints! Let me sweep the metal turnings from the floor of your heavenly shop!"
Up in the royal gallery, Governor Zhao, Grandmaster Ouyang, and two hundred thousand spectators sat frozen in stunned silence.
A dozen imperial elders pinched their own forearms until they bruised, unable to process the scene playing out below.
The apex sovereign of the southern skies... the monster who had leveled Iron Willow Pass and cleaved ten thousand barbarian warriors in half with a single sword stroke... the living terror before whom regional governors knelt in trembling subservience... was prostrating in the sand like a whipped dog, sobbing hysterically and begging a kid in grease-stained denim dungarees for the holy privilege of carrying a grease bucket and wrapping plumbing tape.
Austin stood on the cracked dais, forty-pound server terminal still clamped securely under his left arm.
He looked down at the weeping swordsman with bone-deep, job-site exhaustion.
His system HUD chimed, displaying a bright blue dialogue box:
Austin dismissed the prompt with a lazy flick of his fingers. He pinched the bridge of his nose beneath his spectacles and let out a heavy sigh.
"Look, buddy," Austin said, his flat contractor voice echoing across the silent colosseum. "I already told the last guy who asked me: I don't take apprentices. I run a solo operation. And you definitely ain't touching my Teflon tape. You cross-threaded that spatial seam so badly I had to re-tap the threads with my pipe wrench. If I let you anywhere near my thread sealant, you'd probably wrap it counter-clockwise, cross-thread the fitting, and blow out the whole manifold."
Jiang Taixu went gray as wet ashes.
Panic seized the old man’s heart. He clawed at the sand, voice trembling:
"Master! Do not cast this disciple into the outer dark! I control three thousand spirit-metal mines across the Southern Marches! I hold nine ancestral sword scriptures etched on dragon-bone jade! I have storehouses filled with millennium herbs and heavenly crystals! I will deed my entire sect over to you! I will give you everything!"
"I don't need your sword scriptures," Austin cut in flatly, tapping his birch clipboard with his yellow grease pencil. "I got plenty of scrap paper for starting fires in the coal stove. What I do need... is precision timber cutting."
Jiang Taixu blinked through his tears, freezing. "P-Precision... timber cutting?"
"Yeah," Austin said, shifting the heavy wrench across his shoulder. "Sunset Peak is undergoing a massive structural expansion into a three-floor subterranean industrial facility. I'm framing out fifty storage vaults, four machine shops, and a dozen partitioned cleanrooms. My manual handsaw takes twenty minutes per timber stick, and the tooth set is getting dull as a butter knife. Your high-frequency sword intent has a decent spatial severance profile. Can you cut six-by-six cedar timbers to exact twelve-foot lengths with a tolerance of zero point one millimeter?"
Jiang Taixu knelt in the grit, mouth slowly opening as the words sank in.
*He wants me to use my four centuries of Void-Severing Sword Dao... to cut framing lumber for His sanctuary?!*
*To shape the cedar that frames the Grand Architect’s workshop?!*
*This isn't a chore! This is a test of divine alignment!*
"I CAN!" Jiang Taixu roared in tearful joy, throwing his arms to the sky like a condemned man pardoned at the gallows. "Disciple can sever ten thousand beams of primeval spirit cedar in a single breath! Zero cuts shall deviate by zero point zero one millimeter! I shall cleave the timber with the absolute precision of the void!"
"Zero point one millimeter is plenty," Austin cautioned, holding up a finger. "Don't over-tighten the tolerances. Wood is an organic material—it expands and contracts with ambient humidity. You cut the joints with zero clearance, the framing will bow and pop the drywall panels come summer. Leave a little room for thermal expansion."
Austin unclipped a heavy cast-aluminum tool from his modular work belt.
It was an industrial chalk reel, loaded with eighty feet of braided line and four ounces of high-pigment, ultra-fine blue carpenter’s chalk.
Austin stepped down off the jade dais. He drove the steel hook claw into the edge of a fractured paver, walked fifteen paces across the compacted arena sand, and pulled the braided cord taut.
"Xiaoyao, hold this tension," Austin directed.
Xiaoyao dashed over, dropping his knee to pin the reel against the stone.
Austin walked to the center of the span. He reached down with his gloved thumb and forefinger, pinched the braided line, pulled it four inches straight up into the air, and let go:
*THWACK-SNAP!*
A clean, razor-sharp, electric-blue chalk line slapped across fifteen feet of arena floor, perfectly straight, perfectly true. A small puff of fine blue dust rose into the sunlight.
Down by Austin’s boots, Cerberus Pug trotted over, still dragging the chewed scabbard. The dog’s three snub-nosed heads leaned down to sniff the blue stripe, sneezed in unison as chalk dust hit six nostrils, and gave three quick snorts. All three tail nubs kept wagging like frantic little propellers as the pup sat squarely beside the blue mark, chewing contentedly on the leather wrapping.
Austin pointed his steel toe at the vibrant blue line.
"See this blue line, Taixu?" Austin said, voice dropping into strict superintendent mode. "This is your reference. You cut on the waste side of the blue line. You do not cut down the center of the line, and you sure as hell don't cut inside the line. You eat the line, your studs end up three-thirty-seconds short. You eat the line on my job site, and I backcharge you for the whole stick of lumber. Am I clear?"
Jiang Taixu stared at the vibrant blue chalk stripe as if gazing upon the primary longitude axis of the cosmos.
"The... the Azure Meridian of Creation..." Jiang Taixu whispered with trembling reverence, tears welling behind his eyelids. "The Sacred Boundary of Heavenly Order! Disciple understands! I shall cut only the waste side! I shall never devour the Sacred Blue Line!"
"Good," Austin muttered.
He unslung his leather rucksack and pulled out two items.
First, a flat, rectangular carpenter's pencil made of unpainted cedar, its thick lead sharpened to a chisel edge with a utility knife.
Second, a pair of dark-tinted, shatter-resistant UV-protective polycarbonate safety goggles with an adjustable green elastic headband.
Austin tossed them down:
*Catch.*
Jiang Taixu scrambled forward on his knees, catching the tools against his chest as though receiving the regalia of an empire.
The flat blue pencil was the **Sacred Scribe of Celestial Measurement**.
The dark plastic goggles were the **Dual Spectacles of Void Protection**.
With shaking, reverent fingers, Jiang Taixu tucked the flat wooden pencil behind his right ear, letting it rest against his silver hair like a coronet. Then, with absolute solemnity, he pulled the green elastic strap over his head, settling the dark tinted goggles over his bruised eyes.
Fresh tears streamed down from behind the polycarbonate lenses, dripping onto his shredded crane feathers.
Austin nodded once.
"Looks functional," Austin said, pulling a standard carbon-copy agreement from his clipboard. "Now pay attention to the terms. Under Sunset Peak Fabrication & Maintenance LLC policy, you are classified as an **Independent Framing Subcontractor**, Form 1099 equivalent. You are not a W-2 employee. You provide your own flying swords, you're responsible for your own sharpening stones, and there is no company health insurance, paid time off, or retirement annuity. Starting wage is zero coppers, but you get all the hard-boiled solar-furnace eggs you can eat during fifteen-minute shift breaks. Shift starts at seven sharp on Mount Clear Sky. Monday morning."
Jiang Taixu’s soul soared straight into the clouds. A formal covenant with the Master of the Wrench!
"DISCIPLE THANKS THE PATRIARCH FOR THE VOCATION!" Jiang Taixu bellowed at the top of his lungs, slamming his forehead into the sand so hard another small crater opened beneath his goggles.
Beside Austin, Li Xiaoyao stepped forward, presenting the yellow duplicate sheet and a cheap blue ballpoint pen.
"Sign on the dotted line, Subcontractor Jiang," Xiaoyao said with crisp authority, chest puffed out. "And use the ballpoint pen, please. Patriarch Austin doesn't accept contracts signed in soul-blood. The hemoglobin gums up the carbon-transfer paper and makes the filing duplicates unreadable in the metal cabinet."
"Disciple obeys! Disciple obeys!" Jiang Taixu wept, clutching the plastic pen like an imperial brush, carefully scribbling his name across the bottom line.
Austin adjusted his hard hat, clamped the forty-pound First Epoch server terminal firmly back under his left arm, and looked up at the royal gallery.
His gaze locked onto Provincial Governor Zhao, who was still kneeling by the broken railing with his mouth hanging open.
"Alright, Governor," Austin’s flat, tired voice rang across the quiet colosseum. "The matches are wrapped up, the scrap steel is stacked, and I've secured my new four-hundred-and-eighty-volt power controller. Where do I sign the tournament prize release and tax clearance forms? I need to get this hardware loaded onto my pack-mules before the freight office closes for the weekend."