The corridor opened into a vast, hemispherical vault of polished white jade. Cold cyan LED troffers hummed in the ceiling coves sixty feet overhead, washing the stone in the sterile, uninviting glare of a corporate lobby. Shimmering silver circuit traces wound through the masonry like frozen solder, mapping out the celestial orbits of three hundred constellations. Deep beneath the floorboards, a low-frequency vibration rattled the flagstones like an un-isolated compressor motor running on a cracked mounting bracket.
Right in the center of the hall, resting atop an eight-sided pedestal of carved dragon bone, sat the legendary **Celestial Astrological Go Board of Ten Thousand Epochs**.
Above the board, suspended on three-dimensional magnetic levitation fields, floated sixty-four thousand glowing jade stones. Black and white. They drifted in slow, interlocking polyhedral orbits that mirrored planetary conjunctions and spinning celestial spheres. They didn't just hover; they whirred with a high-pitched piezoelectric whine that made a man's dental fillings throb behind his molars.
Towering beside the pedestal stood an enormous holographic projection: an ethereal, white-bearded phantom clad in imperial Daoist robes of spun gold and simulated starlight, his eyes burning with ancient, pitiless cosmic intellect.
In the sacred annals of the Great Yan Empire, this chamber was whispered of as the ultimate graveyard of mortal minds: **The Trial of the Ten Thousand Move Dao Emperor**.
According to temple lore, the trial tested the supreme outer limits of human wisdom, karmic foresight, and soul calculation. To pass, a challenger had to kneel on the red velvet prayer mat and play an unbroken match of three-dimensional celestial Weiqi against the phantom sovereign. Every single stone placed required calculating millions of branching causal paths across past, present, and future. Karmic debts. Dynastic collapses. Cosmic fortunes.
Three hundred years back, the Supreme Grand Elder of the Grand Void Sect—a peerless master of astrological divination who had clawed his way to the Half-Step Nascent Soul realm—had dragged seven elite disciples into this room to claim the ancient inheritance. He spent forty-seven consecutive months standing motionless before this board. Refused food. Refused water. Let his divine sense burn down to the gray ash of his marrow trying to trace the spinning stones. In the end, his spiritual core cooked itself from the inside out. He coughed nine mouthfuls of curdled lung-blood, went raving mad, and died twitching on the flagstones while screaming about infinite recursions in the stars.
The holographic emperor slowly opened his glowing, ethereal eyes. He looked down upon Austin with terrifying, majestic grandeur, his phantom beard billowing with spectral energy.
A booming, multi-layered synthesized voice crashed through the chamber, rattling the jade wall panels like loose sheet metal in a gale:
*"MORTAL DUST WHO TREADS THE FORBIDDEN HEAVENS... THOU HAST REACHED THE THRESHOLD OF ULTIMATE TRUTH. STEP FORTH AND RECEIVE THE CHESSBOARD OF DESTINY! THOU MUST CALCULATE TEN THOUSAND MOVES ACROSS THE RIVER OF TIME. FAIL BUT A SINGLE STRIKE, AND THY SOUL SHALL BE CONSUMED BY THE VOID OF ETERNAL REGRET!"*
Li Xiaoyao hit his knees with a wet thud, hands clamped over his temples. Even thirty paces back near the doorway, the psychic feedback radiating from those sixty-four thousand spinning stones hit him like a bucket of hot sheet-metal screws dumped down his collar.
"Senior... it is the... the Ten Thousand Move Dao Emperor!" Xiaoyao gasped, his voice cracking as blue veins throbbed against his temples. "His soul calculation speed dwarfs the heavens! We cannot... we cannot even begin to think! Our mortal minds will pop from the sheer weight of the infinite branching stars!"
Austin pushed his midnight-blue safety hard hat back on his head with the meat of his thumb. He adjusted his wire-rimmed spectacles, squinted through a smudge of dark grease on the left lens, and gave the sixty-four thousand floating jade stones a passing glance.
He didn't grab his temples. He didn't drop to his knees. He didn't look remotely impressed.
Instead, Austin walked straight past the plush red velvet prayer mat, stopped at the base of the dragon-bone pedestal, and pointed his yellow grease pencil at the stamped brass placard pop-riveted beneath the board:
**[SECTOR 04: COMPUTATIONAL LOGIC GATE REPLICATION & HEURISTIC DECISION ENGINE]** **[SIMULATION TEST: PARALLEL DISCRETE STATE ANALYSIS (TRIAL 04)]** **[EMULATOR STATUS: HARDWARE INTERRUPT LOOP / MEMORY BUFFER OVERFLOW]**
Austin let out a long, wheezing sigh, clicking his tongue against his teeth.
"A discrete-state logic emulator," Austin muttered, shaking his head. He sounded like a graveyard-shift maintenance tech called out to a pumping station at three in the morning. "Running on an un-buffered parallel co-processor that hasn't seen a firmware update since the Bronze Age."
Austin strolled casually around the side, heading straight for the back of the carved pedestal.
The holographic emperor’s spectral eyebrows twitched. His booming voice hitched, skipping like a scratched CD in an old work truck:
*"HALT, INSOLENT WORM! STEP UPON THE SACRED MAT AND PLACE THY FIRST STONE, OR FACE THE WRATH OF—OF—OF—"*
"Keep your shirt on, grandpa," Austin waved a gloved hand without looking back. "You're stuttering on your audio loop. That's a textbook buffer underrun. You're dropping packets all over the floor."
Austin knelt behind the pedestal: *Clomp.*
Behind the hand-carved jade facade sat a cold-rolled steel service panel secured by four standard Phillips-head sheet-metal screws. Austin pulled his magnetic ratcheting screwdriver from his leather pouch.
*Screee-click, screee-click.*
He backed the screws out, catching each one in his left palm so it wouldn't roll down into the floor grates. With a sharp, metallic *CLANG*, he popped the cover free and set it against his knee.
Inside was a rat's nest of ancient hardware. Dusty First Epoch circuit boards, glowing argon vacuum tubes, and a three-phase power transformer vibrating with an un-damped, tooth-jarring sixty-cycle hum:
*BZZZZZZZZZZZZZT.*
Austin leaned his face into the opening, wrinkling his nose at the warm exhaust draft.
"Smells like cooked dust, scorched solder mask, and dried-out heat-sink paste," Austin muttered. "Look at that aluminum radiator—caked in two solid inches of lint. The cooling fan seized up centuries ago."
He tapped the tip of his yellow grease pencil against an illuminated green cathode tube glowing beside the primary power bus:
Austin chuckled, tapping the tube's glass envelope.
"Ten thousand moves across the river of time?" Austin laughed, shaking his head in disgust. "The damn thing isn't calculating cosmic destiny, Xiaoyao. It’s hung up in an infinite while-loop because some sleep-deprived First Epoch junior tech forgot to put a break condition on thread four ten thousand years ago! The CPU is thermal-throttling at one hundred percent load. The board can't even process player input without throwing an unhandled exception error. It's completely locked up."
Li Xiaoyao stared from the threshold, his mouth opening and closing like a landed carp.
"S-Senior... you mean to say... the Supreme Dao Emperor of Heaven is not plumbing the boundless mysteries of creation... but merely... suffering from an overheated soul?!"
"I'm saying the computer crashed, kid," Austin said, pulling a pair of insulated linesman pliers from his belt. "And why on earth would I sit on a velvet pillow for forty-seven months playing board games against a machine that's already blue-screened?"
Austin reached deep into the dusty cabinet.
Mounted squarely on the main power distribution block was a heavy, red-handled toggle switch stamped with clean, embossed lettering:
**[MAIN LOGIC BUS: 100A 3-PHASE BREAKER — ON / OFF]**
Austin wrapped his gloved fingers around the red plastic handle.
Above the pedestal, the holographic emperor’s glowing eyes flared in digital panic. His regal posture vanished as his spectral hands reached frantically toward the floor:
*"WAIT—NO! CEASE THY UNHOLY TRESPASS UPON THE SACRED ALTAR! DO NOT TOUCH THE ANCIENT LEVER OF—"*
*CLACK.*
Austin yanked the toggle straight down to **[OFF]**.
The sixty-cycle hum died instantly.
The magnetic levitation coils snapped off. With no magnetic field to support them, all sixty-four thousand glowing black and white jade stones plunged from the ceiling like a torrential storm of buckshot, crashing down onto the board and the stone floor in a deafening, clattering avalanche:
*CLATTER-CLATTER-CLATTER-BANG!*
Piles of smooth jade pebbles bounced and ricocheted across the floor, half a dozen bouncing off Austin's steel toes before rolling to a stop.
Above the pedestal, the towering Dao Emperor flickered violently. His golden robes shredded into ragged green scanlines, his mouth opened in a pathetic synthesized squawk—*Wuuuurrrrr-pop*—and the whole projection blew out like an overloaded light bulb.
Dead silence fell over the chamber.
Austin looked down at his digital wrist chronograph.
"Step one," Austin said, crossing his arms over his canvas chest. "Kill the power. Wait ten seconds to let the residual charge in the filter capacitors fully bleed off to ground."
One... two... three... four...
Behind him, Li Xiaoyao knelt frozen stiff, pale as tallow, holding his breath as if waiting for the ceiling to crack open and rain holy fire upon their heads.
...Eight... nine... ten.
Austin reached back into the open service bay and shoved the heavy red toggle firmly upward:
*CLACK-SNAP!*
The main transformer surged back to life with a clean, healthy, resonant hum:
*HUMMMMMMMMM.*
Cool blue indicator LEDs blinked across the motherboard in neat, rhythmic sequences. The central cathode screen flared to life with crisp green phosphor, scrolling through pristine lines of First Epoch bootloader data:
*BIOS INITIALIZATION: SUCCESS.* *MEMORY BUFFER: 0% UTILIZATION (FLUSHED).* *GAME STATE MATRIX: 0 MOVES REGISTERED.* *OPPONENT STATE: ZERO RESPONSE TIMEOUT (3000ms).* *EVALUATION: AUTOMATIC FORFEIT BY OPPOSING ENGINE.*
*DING-DONG!*
A cheerful, three-tone elevator chime rang through the hall, followed by a recorded female voice echoing from the acoustic ceiling baffles:
Across the chamber, the massive three-foot titanium blast doors groaned. Heavy hydraulic locking pins disengaged with an explosive, echoing hiss of compressed air:
*PSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHH-CLUNK!*
Driven by colossal internal cylinders, the titanium slabs parted down the center, sliding into the wall pockets to reveal the glowing depths of **Subterranean Research Sector B**.
Austin put his magnetic screwdriver back into his pouch, dusted the jade grit off his dungarees, and stood up straight:
*Clomp.*
"There," Austin said, pulling his grease pencil to write a neat, heavy checkmark on his clipboard. "Clean reboot. Cleared the cache, reset the board register, and won by technical forfeit in fifteen seconds flat. Always try turning it off and on again before wasting forty-seven months stroking out over a board game."
Li Xiaoyao slowly dropped his forehead all the way to the flagstones, staring at the empty pedestal where generations of supreme sect masters had lost their sanity.
"Zero moves..." Xiaoyao whispered, his voice trembling in transcendental shock. "The Senior conquered the Dao of Ten Thousand Epochs... with a flick of his wrist... without placing a single stone..."
Cerberus Pug trotted lazily up to the pedestal, snuffling through the mountain of fallen jade pebbles. Finding nothing edible, Pug gave a cheerful, tail-wagging triple-bark that echoed into the open hallway:
*Woof, ruff, arf!*
Austin adjusted his safety hard hat and pointed his iridescent blue Stellar-Steel pipe wrench toward the open doors of Sector B:
"All four trials cleared in under thirty minutes," Austin said, his eyes gleaming with the deep satisfaction of a contractor walking onto a finished job site. "Now comes the best part of any proper dungeon run: looting the hardware."