The circular subterranean arena of Floor 9 was so vast and eerily quiet that the distant, rhythmic drip of condensation from an overhead HVAC copper line sounded like the ticking of an ancient doomsday clock.
Fifty paces apart, the two opposing forces stood in stark, surreal contrast.
On the southern perimeter stood one hundred of the most revered martial titans of the Central Continent. There were ancient sect patriarchs in flowing robes woven from nine-cloud celestial silk, Golden Core battle-commanders adorned in dragon-scale lamellar armor, and peerless sword masters haloed by shimmering personal domains of crackling lightning, swirling frost, and roaring sacred flame. Every single one had spent centuries conquering ancient mystic realms, slaughtering cataclysmic demon beasts, and leaving their names inscribed upon golden stone monuments.
On the other side stood Austin.
He had dragged an empty sixty-gallon blue polyethylene chemical drum toward the center of the arena to serve as a makeshift desk. Atop it lay his scratched aluminum storage clipboard, a half-empty roll of electrical tape, and a brass torpedo level. Austin wiped his nose with the flannel cuff of his sleeve, knelt down on one knee, and used his yellow grease pencil to inspect the torque-stripe markings on the two-inch anchor bolts securing the base-plate of Column Line 4-C.
"Seventy-five foot-pounds," Austin muttered to himself, sighting down the thread engagement with one eye closed. "Good. Tie Kuang didn't cross-thread the locknuts this time."
Patriarch Guang Ming stepped forward from the formation. His white beard billowed as if caught in a divine hurricane, his golden robes snapping against his greaves. He pointed the tip of his blazing Solar Godblade directly at Austin’s hard hat:
"Sovereign of the Nether-Sun! The hour of celestial reckoning is at hand! For three days and three nights, your blasphemous artificial star has blinded the righteous heavens of three mortal empires! You have imprisoned twelve imperial dreadnoughts of Great Yan in shackles of profound humiliation! You forced their proud officers and royal crews to wear orange tunics of penitence, and you turned this ancestral peak into an unholy labyrinth of churning iron machinery!"
Guang Ming’s voice swelled, booming and echoing off the polished obsidian-smooth granite dome with deafening spiritual power:
"And worse! You subjected one thousand righteous crusaders of the Ten Sacred Sects to the churning purgatory of the Rubber Samsara! You forced our venerable elders to rake the molten fires of the underworld with eight-foot iron forks! You froze our meridians in the Glacial Vault, and you unleashed your mindless iron colossi to scoop our brave vanguard into pens of shame like stray cattle! Speak, demon king! Why have you wrought such cosmic desecration upon the mortal realm?!"
Austin did not immediately jump to his feet. He took three more seconds to finish drawing a clean yellow alignment mark across the second washer, stood up slowly, and dusted off the double-thick knees of his work overalls.
He turned around, picked up his clipboard, and looked Guang Ming up and down with the hollow, dead-eyed exhaustion of a general contractor dealing with an angry HOA board on a Friday afternoon.
"First of all," Austin said, his voice flat, dry, and amplified cleanly by the arena’s natural acoustics. "The imperial dreadnoughts were not 'imprisoned in shackles of humiliation.' They were cited for violating Municipal Noise Ordinance 42-A: operating un-muffled turbofan spiritual thrusters within five hundred yards of a designated residential boundary between the hours of ten o'clock at night and six o'clock in the morning."
Austin turned a page on his clipboard, pointing with his grease pencil:
"My residential cabin is four hundred and twenty feet from the south ridge. If you fly an eight-hundred-foot, iron-clad military battlecruiser across my front porch, blast high-temperature exhaust into my vegetable garden, and park across my scenic cedar view without paying the transient dockage fee at the harbormaster’s office, your landing skids get wheel boots. That isn't demonic desecration. That is standard, municipal code parking enforcement."
Grand Abbot Wu Nian’s bronze eyes bulged in shock. He leaned toward Guang Ming, his bronze staff trembling:
"'Municipal code parking enforcement'?! Heavens above! Patriarch, hear his words! He invokes the ancient, forgotten legal codices of the Ancient Creators! He claims the very sky above this mountain is bound by invisible municipal decrees!"
Austin rubbed the bridge of his nose, exhaling a long, weary breath. He held up a second gloved finger:
"Second of all, the Second Sun above this mountain is not an 'artificial star of blasphemy.' It is a Level Sixty-Two Sol-Class Main Sequence Stellar Fusion Core operating under stable, smooth pressure balance with closed-loop magnetic shielding. It generates three exawatts of clean, continuous baseload thermal and electrical power for this entire geographic district. It does not burn coal, it does not burn spirit oil, and it does not emit a single gram of sulfur dioxide, particulate ash, or greenhouse smog into your mortal atmosphere. By all rights, your Ten Sects should be sending me an official clean energy tax credit and a letter of commendation, not an armed crusade."
Sword Matron Ling Yue took a sharp, horrified gasp, clutching her robes to her chest:
"'Stellar Fusion Core... stable, smooth pressure balance... clean energy tax credit...' Merciful ancestors! He claims to hold a living, unblemished celestial star captive within his mortal dantian! He commands the raw fires of creation to generate an invisible lifeblood for his subterranean kingdom, yet mocks our righteous crusade as a bureaucratic oversight!"
Austin raised a third finger, his jaw setting into a hard, rigid line:
"And third of all, nobody forced any of you to rake the slag or chip the ice out of the refrigeration drainage troughs. There are bright yellow OSHA warning signs posted every twenty-five feet in four different dialects! The signs clearly state: *RESTRICTED INDUSTRIAL MAINTENANCE ZONE - AUTHORIZED CERTIFIED PERSONNEL ONLY - HARD HATS AND EYE PROTECTION REQUIRED*."
Austin gestured aggressively with his clipboard toward the south tunnel:
"Your disciples literally vaulted over my safety barricades, broke into the tool lockers, grabbed my custom-forged magnesium slag rakes, and started skimming my foundry gutters for free! Now, from a project management perspective, I appreciate the three days of free apprentice labor—saved my concrete crew forty man-hours of surface prep. But you can't voluntarily trespass into an active heavy-foundry splash zone, steal my company tools to do unpaid site cleanup, and then complain to management that you were subjected to cosmic torture!"
The ninety-seven sect masters and elders in the vanguard blinked in stunned, paralyzed silence. Several elders glanced down at their calloused palms, suddenly remembering how eager they had been to grab the iron rakes back on Floor 2 because they thought the molten titanium was a celestial river of divine treasure.
Austin flipped to the final summary page on his clipboard, tapping the total with his grease pencil:
"Now let's talk about the real problem here: accounting. Your alliance paid four hundred and fifty thousand spirit stones for the one-thousand-person general admission excursion pass. That ticket tier covers access to Floors One through Eight, the automated sorting trials, and the mid-dungeon refreshment terrace. But you brought an unauthorized vanguard of one hundred armed combatants down to Floor Nine."
Austin pointed up toward the soaring ceiling dome, where dozens of high-bay metal-halide work lights flooded the arena with clinical white illumination:
"Floor Nine is classified as a Cataclysmic Boss Encounter Arena. Operating these high-bay floodlights after five o'clock in the evening requires spooling up the auxiliary turbine on Floor Six, which falls under peak-demand overtime rates. That incurs a facility surcharge of exactly twelve thousand spirit stones per hour. Do you have the corporate purchase voucher, or am I going to have to file a commercial lien against your sect headquarters in the Central Continent?"
The words hung in the vast arena like a cold, iron slap across the face.
For five agonizing seconds, nobody moved. The crusaders froze stiff. The sound of water dripping from the HVAC pipe seemed deafening.
Patriarch Guang Ming’s weathered face turned from pale white, to mottled red, and finally to a deep, white-hot shade of furious, apoplectic purple. The veins on his temples pulsed like coiled vipers beneath his skin.
"He mocks us..." Guang Ming hissed, his knuckles popping with the force of small firecrackers around his godblade’s grip. "He mocks the dignity of the Ten Sacred Sects! He speaks of 'parking citations,' 'noise ordinances,' and 'overtime electricity surcharges' to conceal his insatiable demonic thirst for our immortal souls! He dares to treat the grandest holy war of our millennium as a mere commercial ledger dispute!"
Guang Ming raised his Solar Godblade high into the air. The golden blade burst into a roaring column of solar fire that licked eighty feet into the vaulted ceiling, singeing the paint on the structural box-trusses:
"Righteous brothers! Heed the call of Heaven! The demon king’s tongue is poison! He shall barter no more with the lives of mortal men! Disciples of the Ten Sects! Form the ancestral formation! Let the radiant light of the true Dao incinerate this mountain and purge this blasphemous contractor from the face of the cosmos!"
"**Ten-Sect Holy Extermination Formation!**" roared one hundred martial masters in a synchronized, earth-shaking war cry.
*WHOOSH! SWOOSH! BANG!*
In an instant, the one hundred crusaders leaped into pre-assigned combat positions across the polished concrete floor, arranging themselves into three concentric triangles spanning eighty paces wide.
Under their boots, blinding golden talismanic circuits flared into existence. Golden Core and Soul Formation auras erupted like miniature volcanoes, casting dazzling beams of crimson, sapphire, emerald, and platinum light into the air. The light rays linked from shoulder to shoulder, meridian to meridian, forming an intricate, interconnected three-dimensional web of pure, high-voltage spiritual destruction.
At the center of the arena, Austin lowered his clipboard back onto the polyethylene drum.
He stepped forward, his steel-toed boots clicking cleanly on the concrete. He reached up, grasped the handle of his five-foot Stellar-Steel pipe wrench, and slowly lowered it from his shoulder, resting the heavy, serrated four-hundred-pound steel head against the floor.
He looked at the glowing array lines linking the one hundred cultivators, his eyes narrowing in cold, professional appraisal:
"Unshielded multi-point Delta load configuration," Austin muttered under his breath, shaking his head with visceral, craftsman disgust. "Zero circuit breakers. No equipment grounding conductor. And a completely unbalanced forty-five-degree phase lag across the north and west feeder legs. You guys are going to pop the main substation breaker in about thirty seconds, and I’m the one who’s going to have to reset the panel."