The Central Transit Concourse of Sector A looked like a decommissioned subway terminal built by paranoid giants.
Every surface was clad in brushed titanium, cold-rolled stainless steel, and interlocking white ceramic panels. High overhead, heavy structural steel trusses supported five-hundred-MCM copper busbars and armored fiber bundles. The whole cavern hummed. It wasn't the singing resonance of spiritual jade or celestial bells. It was the low, bone-deep sixty-cycle drone of three-thousand-year-old First Epoch geothermal switchgear waking up from standby.
The concourse was sixty yards wide, forty feet tall, and drafty as a grain silo. Down the center of the vaulted ceiling, recessed fluorescent strip lights flickered to life in cascading banks, humming as their magnetic ballasts struggled against millennia of cold damp.
Austin paused on the threshold, his heavy steel-toed boots resting on the perimeter expansion joint. Under his left arm, he carried the First Epoch diagnostic terminal cube. In his right hand, his yellow grease pencil hung poised over a battered aluminum clipboard.
*BZZZZZT-CLANK.*
Beneath the cast-iron floor grates, a live high-voltage busbar made contact.
The automated diagnostic handshake hit like a dead short across a three-phase four-hundred-eighty-volt main breaker. No warning siren. No safety chime. Just an unmetered wall of raw, direct-current juice leaping through the soles of Austin’s boots.
The current hammered straight up his leg bones, tearing through his meridian pathways like high-octane fuel poured down a furnace flue. Pale-blue static snapped across the copper rivets of his Carhartt dungarees. The brim of his midnight-blue fiberglass hard hat lit up with a faint violet corona of Saint Elmo’s fire.
Austin grit his teeth, locked his knees, and let the surge roll through him.
"Damn it all," he muttered through clenched molars. "Tripped the bus without an isolation transformer. Who wired this dump? Shoddy work."
Across the vault ceiling, exposed cryogenic feeder tubes—sub-zero coolant loops insulated with deteriorating asbestos wraps—hissed violently. Frost bloomed in jagged ferns over bare copper splices. The ancient builders hadn't even bothered to run drip loops on the liquid nitrogen chill lines. Condensation was dripping straight down into an open-trough cable raceway, sputtering and sparking against ungrounded junction boxes. It was a miracle the whole mountain hadn't arc-flashed into slag centuries ago.
*DING.*
A clear, glassy chime vibrated through his jaw, rattling his back teeth:
Deep in Austin’s gut, the compressed star-plasma pearl flared.
It swelled fifteen percent by volume, churning like an arc furnace choked on pure oxygen. Seven hundred and fifty thousand Kelvin of blinding white heat roared against the internal quantum containment mesh. The degenerate metallic hydrogen core churned with violent magnetic heat currents, dumping twelve quadrillion watts of raw energetic yield into his dantian walls. That was enough juice to light up three continents, provided you had the copper to carry it.
The containment mesh held at ninety-nine point nine nine eight percent.
The remaining zero point zero zero two percent leaked into the room.
*CRACK-WHAM.*
Gravity hit the concourse like an unmoored crane counterweight.
The downward pressure spiked straight to fourteen times Earth normal.
Beside Austin, Li Xiaoyao made a wet, strangled squeak. The boy’s knees caved instantly. His Foundation Realm qi shrieked through his spine in a desperate scramble to reinforce his rib cage, his pristine white cultivator robes plastering flat against his shins like wet paper. The ceramic tiles beneath his cloth slippers groaned under sudden, unbearable tonnage.
"P-Patriarch!" Xiaoyao wheezed, spit flying as his jaw dragged toward his chest. His fingers clawed at his surveying tripod to keep from pancaking onto the tiles. "Is this... is this the legendary Gravitational Domain of the Ancient Earth Emperor?! The Dao of Heavenly Heaviness testing this disciple's marrow?!"
Austin glanced down at him. "It's a containment leak, kid. Keep your core tight or you'll pop an inguinal hernia. Breathe through your nose."
A few feet away, Pug didn't care about the Dao of Heaviness.
The eight-hundred-pound Three-Headed Nether-Solar Cerberus merely gave a low, rumbling huff from his middle throat. His black-scaled legs spread slightly, settling into the tiles with a dull *clack*. To a dog forged from hyper-dense solar muscle and volcanic marrow, fourteen gravities felt about like a thick wool blanket on a chilly November morning.
Pug’s left head lowered to sniff an abandoned junction box. A thick bundle of heavy-duty black nylon cable ties hung from a rusted strut, securing a dead sensor cable. Pug’s right jaws clamped onto the loose plastic tail of the zip-tie, gnawing on it with loud, rhythmic crunches: *munch, crunch, squeak.* Meanwhile, his middle head let out a colossal canine yawn, tongue curling like a slice of pink baloney, completely indifferent to the crushing atmospheric slaughter surrounding them.
Austin lifted his left boot.
*Clomp.*
He lifted his right boot.
*Clomp.*
The soles felt stuck in hardened pine pitch. A spiderweb of hairline tension cracks spread across the white ceramic glaze under each heel strike, though the bedrock subfloor took the weight without giving way. Austin scowled, rolling his shoulders in irritation.
"Fourteen point two percent movement drag," Austin growled, tapping his grease pencil against the clipboard frame. "Ridiculous. Look at this collision mesh. The engine thinks I'm trudging through four feet of slumping six-bag concrete mix. Whoever tuned the friction physics in this zone needs their credentials revoked."
Xiaoyao hung from his tripod, veins bulging purple along his forehead. "Master... the physics engine... does that govern the wheel of karmic suffering that binds our souls to the dust?!"
"No," Austin said flatly, unbuckling his side utility pouch. "It means the character model mass isn't balanced along the z-axis. The game calculates downforce on the heel strike instead of distributing the load across the arch. Sloppy coding. Half-assed rigging."
Austin dug into his hardware pouch and pulled out four heavy threaded pipe couplings, precision-machined from forged high-density tungsten-steel. Each coupling weighed twelve pounds and smelled of cutting oil.
With quick, symmetrical motions, Austin dropped two couplings into his left cargo pocket and two into his right cargo pocket:
*Clink. Clank.*
He bounced twice on his heels. The orbital rings encircling his work boots sparked bright azure, snapping his center of gravity back into clean vertical plumb.
"There," Austin muttered, testing a side step. "Center of mass re-aligned. Static equilibrium restored. That'll stop the character rig from clipping into the baseboards during a pivot."
He looked down at his shins.
The breakthrough to Level 38 had kicked his micro-orbital debris field into its fourth tier.
One hundred and twelve individual fragments were now locked into stable trajectories four inches above the floor. Granite gravel, petrified pine needles, Cold-Iron lathe shavings, and two iridescent soap bubbles scavenged from the cleaning shower rotated in four counter-rotating concentric rings. They whirled with the crisp, muted whine of a multi-stage vacuum turbine.
A drift of airborne lime dust wafted within four inches of his trousers. The outer ring intercepted it with a crisp, dry *snap*, reducing the speck to ion mist.
Austin adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses, flicked on the dual-beam LED on his hard hat, and peered down the corridor.
At the far end of the concourse, the hallway ended at a massive four-way intersection. Four colossal blast doors of reinforced titanium alloy sealed off four radiating wings. High-contrast yellow-and-black hazard chevrons were stenciled across each bulkhead, accompanied by luminescent First Epoch safety notices:
1. **Sector 1**: `[OPTICAL REFLECTION & NEURAL SENSORY TEST CHAMBER]` *(Ancient imperial scrolls: The 1,000-Year Mirror Maze of Soul-Cleansing)* 2. **Sector 2**: `[STRUCTURAL GRAVITATIONAL SHEAR TENSION CORRIDOR]` *(Ancient imperial scrolls: The Gravity Bridge of Nine Hells and Shattered Bones)* 3. **Sector 3**: `[HIGH-TEMPERATURE THERMAL RUNAWAY EXHAUST FLUE]` *(Ancient imperial scrolls: The Nine-Yang Divine Purgatory of Heavenly Fire)* 4. **Sector 4**: `[LOGIC GATE COMPREHENSION & CIRCUIT TEST BENCH]` *(Ancient imperial scrolls: The 10,000-Move Spirit Chessboard of Infinite Wisdom)*
Austin set his clipboard against the diagnostic terminal cube and pulled up the plant architectural schematics. His grease pencil traced the lines with weary familiarity.
"Look at this garbage," Austin said, shaking his head. "An optical sensor test bay for zeroing laser alignment heads. A structural strain gantry for proof-testing motorized forklift bridges under cyclic dynamic load. A thermal exhaust bypass flue for dumping incinerator slag. And a basic breadboard logic bench to see if apprentice wiremen know how an AND gate works before letting them touch a live panel."
Li Xiaoyao stared at the stencils, trembling in sheer religious horror.
"Master! The sacred records of the Great Yan Imperial Academy state these Four Heavenly Trials were erected by the Ancient Gods to test the courage, karmic purity, and marrow of the realm's supreme heroes! Hundreds of thousands of Golden Core ancestors perished attempting to solve the ten-thousand-move chessboard!"
"Xiaoyao," Austin said, looking at the boy over his wire rims. "It’s a vocational screening station. Three thousand years ago, the plant manager put these four booths in the lobby so greenhorn handymen wouldn't blow up the steam boilers on their first shift. The local sects wandered in, lost the operations manual, couldn't read the schematics, and turned a standard pre-employment safety test into a suicide cult."
Austin opened his newly unlocked blueprint window:
**[Heavy Pneumatic Concrete Jackhammer (Tier 4)]**.
The schematic spun slowly in his display. It was a brutal piece of iron: an oil-tempered tungsten-carbide chisel bit, a dual-stroke pneumatic piston cycling at twenty-eight hundred blows a minute, and vibration-damped rubber handles built to soak up fifteen thousand foot-pounds of blunt kinetic impact.
A thin, deeply unhinged grin tugged at the corner of Austin’s mouth.
"A thousand years in a mirror maze? A ten-thousand-move chess puzzle?" Austin unslung his five-foot, iridescent blue Stellar-Steel pipe wrench and rested it across his shoulder with a metallic *thunk*. "Not happening. I'm not running four hours of fetch-quest platforming just to get a level-two maintenance badge. Worst XP-per-hour routing I've ever seen."
Xiaoyao blinked, bewildered. "If we do not conquer the trials of the First Gods... how will the blast doors open?"
Austin tapped the tungsten-carbide chisel icon on his HUD.
"In software, they call it sequence-breaking," Austin said, his eyes glittering behind his safety specs. "On a job site, it's called unauthorized architectural modification. We're skipping the puzzle logic entirely and clipping through the drywall."
Austin whistled between his teeth, pointing the wrench toward the Sector 1 bulkhead.
"Pack it up, Xiaoyao. Pug, drop that damn cable tie. Let's go show this facility what an unpatched speedrun looks like."