The cavernous vault of Floor 9 transformed in an instant from an echoing industrial chamber into a raging, blinding sea of white-hot holy fury.
One hundred of the Central Continent’s supreme martial champions, having locked their spiritual channels in the ancient **Ten-Sect Holy Extermination Formation**, were pouring their collective lifeforce and cultivation bases into a single, cataclysmic matrix. In eight hundred years of continental history, never had the Ten Sacred Sects unified their ancestral techniques in such a manner; ancient rivalries between the Buddhist monasteries, the Taoist sword sanctums, and the imperial battle-clans were dissolved in the crucible of holy war against the Mountain Sovereign.
Beneath their boots, the polished concrete floor screamed under the thermal and spiritual onslaught. Intricate golden talismanic circuits, etched directly into the air by pure intent, flared across eighty paces of open slab.
Grand Abbot Wu Nian anchored the northern apex of the triangular array. His massive bronze chest expanded as he slammed the butt of his nine-ringed staff into the floor, channeling the ancient *Vajra Immovable Mountain Sutra*. A dome of golden, bell-shaped defensive radiance radiated from his pores, forming a high-density inductive barrier.
"Ancestors of the Iron Zen Monastery!" Wu Nian chanted, his bronze skin glowing with molten golden luminescence, the nine heavy rings of his staff shivering with such intense vibration that they blurred into golden halos. "Provide the unyielding foundation! Let the golden marrow of the Arhats sustain the wrath of Heaven! We shall be the anvil upon which the demon's insolence is shattered!"
On the western node stood Sword Matron Ling Yue. Her nine ancient frost swords did not merely spin; they accelerated into a blinding turbine of sub-zero absolute rime, whistling with the sound of a winter gale through a mountain crevasse. The ambient moisture in the arena instantly crystallized, falling to the floor as an icy shower of diamond frost. Her silver hair lashed like whips in the freezing gale, her icy blue eyes fixed upon Austin with unyielding holy resolve.
"Frost Jade Sect, align the celestial cold!" Ling Yue cried out, her throat straining against the roaring spiritual winds. "Let the Yin-current freeze the demon’s demonic marrow! We shall bind his spatial coordinates in absolute permafrost so that Heaven's judgment may strike without fail!"
And at the southern apex, elevated five feet above the ground upon a swirling disc of solar flames, stood Patriarch Guang Ming. His Solar Godblade pointed straight up toward the reinforced titanium ceiling dome, acting as the primary collector antenna for the entire one-hundred-man spiritual grid.
Between these three apex leaders stood the ninety-seven grand elders and peak Golden Core battle-commanders. They had positioned themselves in precise hexagonal clusters, acting as spiritual step-up transformers and living capacitor banks. Each elder held a jade talisman between their palms, their meridians bulging like thick ropes beneath their robes as they pressurized their inner dantians to the absolute threshold of rupture.
"Ancestors of the Ten Sects, witness our holy resolve!" Guang Ming’s voice boomed, drowning out the roar of the subterranean air handlers. "Channel every drop of your Golden Core qi! Withhold nothing! For the honor of the mortal realm, we summon the **Heaven-Cleaving Light of Divine Judgment**!"
*BOOOOOOOOOOM!*
From the chests of all one hundred cultivators, blinding beams of concentrated qi erupted simultaneously. Crimson streams of blood-forged battle qi, azure arcs of lightning dao, emerald rivers of wood vitality, and blinding white ribbons of pure solar essence converged upon the apex above Guang Ming’s blade.
Under unimaginable spiritual compression, the intersecting light rays fused, solidified, and condensed.
The light did not merely glow; it manifested physical mass and razor-sharp geometry. Within four seconds, hovering seventy feet in the air beneath the structural box-trusses, there materialized a colossal, fifty-foot-long two-handed broadsword of pure, crystalline golden radiance.
The divine blade screamed with raw, unconstrained power. Jagged bolts of violet and sapphire spiritual lightning arced across its serrated edges, discharging violently into the air.
Inside Floor 9, the atmospheric pressure surged by fifteen percent in less than two seconds. The high-bay metal-halide work lights suspended from the ceiling flickered frantically, their iron ballasts buzzing from sixty hertz up to a frantic, screaming one-hundred-and-twenty hertz hum as the magnetic flux warped the electrical supply lines. The four-inch galvanized steel ventilation ductwork along the perimeter walls rattled against their unistrut hangers with a deafening metallic shudder. The entire atmosphere in the room ionized into sharp, biting ozone, smelling of crushed stones, scorching quartz, and the terrifying, unbridled fury of a wrathful god.
To any mortal, cultivator, or demonic beast in the world, this spectacle was the supreme pinnacle of martial perfection—a celestial weapon forged from the unified souls of one hundred masters, capable of sundering an entire mountain range or evaporating an imperial fleet in a single stroke!
To Austin, who stood twenty paces away watching the spectacle with his arms crossed over his chest, it was the single most horrifying electrical fire hazard he had ever witnessed in his entire professional career.
"Good grief," Austin muttered, his voice dripping with profound, personal disgust. "Look at that wiring layout. It's an absolute miracle they haven't electrocuted themselves already."
Austin reached into the side holster of his heavy leather tool belt. He pulled out a pair of heavy, rubber-gasketed Shade-14 arc-welding goggles, fitted with dual green-tinted polarized polycarbonate lenses designed to withstand five-thousand-ampere direct plasma flashes. He stretched the thick black elastic headband over the crown of his midnight-blue Sovereign Hard Hat and snapped the heavy lenses down over his eyes.
*CLICK.*
The blinding, room-filling golden glare instantly vanished.
Through the dark, filtered green glass, the mythical "Heaven-Cleaving Divine Judgment" was stripped of all its poetic, theological romance. To Austin’s trained eyes, it resolved into a chaotic, tangled mess of raw thermodynamic thermal vectors, uninsulated high-voltage potential lines, and screaming magnetic flux loops.
Austin pulled his yellow grease pencil from his vest pocket and held it up against the light, sighting the array connections like a structural inspector finding fault with a bridge deck.
"Look at that feeder routing," Austin grumbled, shaking his head until his hard hat creaked. "You've got three completely different sect traditions tying their maximum high-voltage output directly into the same uninsulated central terminal bus! There are no intermediate fuse blocks. There are no metal-oxide varistor surge arrestors. There isn't a single flyback bypass diode anywhere on that entire fifty-foot emitter assembly!"
He squinted through the green glass, his grease pencil tracing the chaotic arcs crackling between the northern and western nodes:
"And the phase alignment! It’s a total disaster! The Buddhist vajra current on the north leg is running at sixty hertz, but the frost sword energy on the west leg is pulsing at forty-two hertz with a forty-five-degree phase lag! That’s generating at least sixty-five percent total harmonic distortion across the entire feeder bus! And look at their ground reference—the neutral conductor is floating completely free in mid-air!"
Austin pinched the bridge of his nose through his goggles, his contractor soul in absolute agony as he watched the ninety-seven elders sweating blood:
"If that main array discharges into an inductive load, the inductive kickback is going to blow back straight down those unshielded feeder lines like a lightning strike through a wet telephone wire! It’s going to back-feed into their dantians at three hundred thousand volts! They’re basically running a bootleg three-phase arc furnace off an ungrounded extension cord plugged into a residential bathroom outlet! If an OSHA inspector walked in here right now, he'd have a stroke on the spot!"
Austin glanced up at his high-bay floodlights. The violent electromagnetic pulses radiating from the holy broadsword were causing the metal-halide fixtures to strobe like a broken disco ball.
"Those ballasts are rated for four hundred watts continuous," Austin muttered, clicking his tongue in irritation. "If their field warps the line voltage past two hundred and seventy-seven volts, every single capacitor in those ballast enclosures will pop like popcorn. That’s seventy-two light fixtures. Do you have any idea how long it takes to haul a scissor lift down the freight hoist to replace seventy-two ballasts eighty feet in the air? At least three full shifts!"
Up in the roaring vortex, Patriarch Guang Ming was entirely deaf to Austin’s technical critique. His robes were shredding under the gale; his eyes were shining with golden celestial fire as he gazed down upon the solitary contractor standing in the center of the arena.
To Guang Ming, Austin’s strange green-eyed mask was an ancient First Epoch war visor, and his muttered calculations were the dark, forbidden curses of an abyssal demon seeking to unravel reality itself!
"Demon Sovereign!" Guang Ming roared, his voice shaking the mountain bedrock to its deepest core. "Tremble before the collective righteous might of the Central Continent! Your dark contraptions end here! In three breaths, your demonic shell shall be reduced to atomic ash! Slay the beast for Heaven!"
"**CLEAVE THE ABYSS!**" roared one hundred martial masters, pouring their final reserves of golden core qi into the matrix.
*SKRRRRRRRR-BOOOOOM!*
The fifty-foot golden sword of divine judgment shuddered in mid-air, tilted its massive serrated tip downward, and locked onto Austin’s hard hat.
With a concussive shockwave that shattered the protective glass lenses of twelve wall-mounted emergency exit signs, the colossal blade descended!
It moved at supersonic speed, cleaving the air with a shriek that sounded like the firmament itself being ripped in half. The radiant heat washing ahead of the blade was so extreme that the surface sealant on the concrete floor twenty feet below began to bubble and smoke; the steel unistrut hangers holding the overhead conduit runs turned dull red, sagging under the thermal wash.
Through his Shade-14 welding goggles, Austin didn’t even flinch. He didn’t back up an inch. His pulse didn't jump by a single beat.
He dropped his grease pencil back into his vest pocket. With a smooth, casual motion born of twenty years of heavy industrial maintenance, his right gloved hand reached down to his hip and gripped the knurled steel handle of his five-foot Stellar-Steel pipe wrench.
With his left thumb, Austin gave the knurled steel adjustment wheel of the wrench three quick, calculated turns. The hardened upper jaw backed off precisely half an inch, setting the gap between the serrated titanium-alloy teeth to exactly four-and-a-half inches—the precise diameter of the high-density optical core at the center of the descending blade.
"Unbalanced three-phase Delta load," Austin said, his voice completely level inside the howling maelstrom. "Unshielded conductors operating in an enclosed space. Total disregard for National Electrical Code Article Two-Fifty."
Austin took a single, solid step forward with his left steel-toed boot, setting his weight into the concrete slab.
He swung the four-hundred-pound pipe wrench upward with one arm, balancing the monstrous tool with the fluid, effortless grace of a master mechanic reaching for a twelve-millimeter socket:
"Time to trip the main breaker."