Within three weeks of the Grand Crusader Alliance’s descent into Floor 9, the geopolitical, spiritual, and macroeconomic landscape of the cultivation world underwent a tectonic transformation.
The news had struck the Central Continent like an unbuffered high-voltage surge. One thousand elite righteous champions—drawn from thirty-six premier sects, backed by an imperial decree from the Great Yan Court, and led by three legendary Soul Formation patriarchs—had marched into the dreaded "Demon Lair of the Second Sun." Every diviner and bloodline elder had predicted an apocalyptic slaughter. Sect halls had prepared funerary tablets, weeping disciples had donned white mourning robes, and imperial archivists had dipped their brushes into black ink to record the tragedy.
Instead, forty-eight hours later, spiritual telegraph relays clattered to life.
Zero champions had perished. Nobody was flayed, tortured, or enslaved. On the contrary, official correspondence arrived at the highest sect palaces, carried by courier cranes and stamped with an unfamiliar, terrifyingly crisp rectangular seal:
The shock was paralyzing. Grand Elders stared at the crisp linen parchment, their jaws dangling over their silk sashes. Similar letters arrived from Grand Abbot Wu Nian—praising the profound emptiness of clean-room mop buckets—and from Sword Matron Ling Yue, who reported that her sword-intent ascended three realms after mastering industrial citrus degreaser.
The result was total commercial pandemonium.
Across three great empires, every major sect master, sovereign clan lord, and merchant guild reached the same feverish conclusion: *The demon sovereign’s subterranean fortress was not a death trap. It was the greatest supreme trial ground in the history of the mortal realm.*
If sweeping floors and dodging conveyor belts dissolved thousand-year bottlenecks overnight, then every disciple with a pulse needed to be sent to Sunset Peak immediately.
At the Great Yan Imperial Capital, normal life ceased. The western mag-lev terminal was mobbed by hundreds of thousands of cultivators. The 650-mile-per-hour *Sunset Express*—running on Austin’s 2,000-mile dual-track superconducting guideway—was instantly overwhelmed. What had begun as a modest three-car bullet train was rapidly expanded into twelve twenty-car express shuttles operating on a relentless, fifteen-minute departure schedule.
"Maintain queue discipline behind the yellow boundary markers!" bellowed imperial station marshals, sweating profusely through their formal dragon robes. "Do not channel sword-flight within the terminal canopy! The overhead catenary carries twenty-five thousand volts of single-phase alternating current! If your flying sword bridges the high-voltage conductor, you will vaporize into three grams of copper-scented ozone!"
Yet the pilgrims could not be deterred. Golden Core prodigies and grey-bearded merchant lords shoved onto the passenger coaches. Inside the climate-controlled cabins, cultivators gasped as the train accelerated from zero to six hundred and fifty miles per hour in absolute silence, without a trace of turbulence. Outside the double-pane polycarbonate windows, ancient mountain ranges blurred into a continuous streak of green and grey.
"Incredible..." whispered an elder of the Cloud Sparrow Sect, watching a cup of hot green tea sit on his fold-out tray table without a single ripple. "Six hundred leagues in a single breath, yet not a ripple in the tea! This is the Dao of Perfectly Balanced Inertia!"
Over one hundred thousand cultivators arrived at the Sunset Peak mountain depot every single week.
The sudden influx threatened to drown Sunset Peak’s reception infrastructure in chaos. In the early days, cultivators attempted to barter using traditional currency: clinking leather pouches of raw spirit stones of wildly varying purity, carved jade bottles of unrefined spirit spring water, and bundles of wild ginseng.
The result had been administrative gridlock.
"Master Austin, we cannot process them!" Li Xiaoyao had cried two weeks prior, surrounded by shouting cultivators waving sacks of glowing gravel. "One sect offers seventy low-grade water crystals with twenty percent mineral inclusions! Another offers dried badger pelts! The exchange rates fluctuate wildly, our scales are coated in beast fat, and elders nearly came to blows over whether a cracked pendant was worth two tickets to the Conveyor Gauntlet!"
Austin had stood on the observation balcony, arms crossed over his orange safety vest, looking down with the cold, pitying gaze of an experienced contractor watching an amateur pour concrete without an expansion joint.
"Barter economies are a logistical nightmare," Austin had grunted. "You can’t run an industrial facility on dried pelts and sketchy quartz. If you want high-throughput tourist processing, you need standardization and fiat backed by unbreakable utility. Xiaoyao, clear the plaza. We’re printing municipal vouchers."
Within forty-eight hours, Austin and Xiaoyao instituted the **Sunset Peak Municipal Dungeon Voucher System**:
Printed on heavy cotton-linen rag paper produced by the Floor 2 hydraulic press, each bill was embedded with micro-copper magnetic security threads and serialized with UV-reactive ink. If any rogue cultivator attempted to replicate the voucher using illusion arts, the turnstiles' magnetic sensors instantly triggered a 480-volt warning zap straight to the offender’s fingers.
Within twenty days, the blue-and-gold Sunset Peak Vouchers became the undisputed universal reserve currency of the Central and Eastern Continents.
Sects stopped hoarding raw spirit stones. Caravan guilds refused imperial silver coins. Why carry forty chests of heavy, low-purity stone when you could carry a crisp, water-resistant stack of Sunset Peak Vouchers? A merchant in the southern swamps could trade medicinal lotus to a northern nomad, and both parties gladly settled in Austin’s hundred-voucher notes—knowing they were redeemable for solar-roasted eggs, high-tensile titanium bolts, or training slots in the legendary labyrinth.
Ancient family clans traded prime city parcels and ancestral mountain peaks just to accumulate suitcases of vouchers. Their sole objective: securing advance reservation vouchers for their junior disciples to run the Floor 1 Conveyor Sorting Gauntlet.
"Why pay three million gold for a private spirit spring retreat where disciples sit on cushions and stare at waterfalls?" argued Elder Azure Cloud during a heated banquet at the Great Yan Capital. "You send thirty disciples down to Floor One for fifteen thousand vouchers! For three hours, they dodge twenty-five-mile-per-hour industrial rubber belts, leap across steel roller beds, and shatter three-ton basalt boulders before the rocks crush the return chutes! After two weeks of sorting raw copper ore under the supervision of the Sovereign’s iron golems, their footwork surpasses the finest sword dancers of the imperial palace! Their core stability is impenetrable! And best of all—they get a warm solar egg when their shift ends!"
Down on Floor 1, this "spiritual enlightenment" was a spectacle of roaring machinery and ecstatic, sweat-drenched physical labor.
The massive cavern hummed with eighty high-speed conveyor lines operating at two hundred and fifty percent of rated design capacity. Millions of tons of crushed mountain basalt and raw copper ore poured down the chutes from the primary excavators.
Normally, keeping these belts clear would require an army of three hundred paid laborers, heavy hydraulic scrapers, and thousands of man-hours of exhausting shovel work. Instead, Austin was being paid millions of spirit stones by the realm's most prestigious martial artists for the sheer privilege of doing it for him.
"Clear the trammel screen! Chute four has a boulder jam!" shouted a Foundation Realm scion of the Iron Sword Sect, his silk robes stripped down to linen trousers, wearing an oversized yellow hard hat that slipped over his eyebrows.
With an ecstatic battle cry, the young noble leaped three fathoms into the air, drawing a five-foot broadsword. Channeling his family’s ancestral *Mountain-Cleaving Blade Art*, he struck the stuck basalt boulder with pinpoint precision. *CRACK!* The boulder shattered into six-inch gravel pieces, tumbling cleanly through the sizing grate and onto the secondary sorting conveyor.
"Target eliminated! Chute four flowing at nominal velocity!" the youth screamed, panting with wild exhilaration, his face smeared with black coal dust. Behind him, fifty fellow sect disciples cheered at the top of their lungs, scrambling along the rubber catwalks with heavy steel rakes to dislodge smaller pebbles.
High above the cavern floor, perched on the cantilevered steel observation catwalk, Superintendent Tie Kuang leaned over the handrail, staring down at the frenzied activity below. In his hands, the brass mechanical abacus clicked so rapidly that the miniature gears emitted a faint wisp of friction smoke.
"Master Austin..." Tie Kuang gasped, his voice trembling with profound awe. "Weekly gross revenue has officially surpassed eight million, four hundred thousand spirit stones."
Tie Kuang turned to Austin, his eyes wide behind his clear polycarbonate spectacles:
"Our raw ore processing backlog is completely gone. In fact, these young masters are clearing the rock so aggressively that our primary crusher cannot supply them fast enough! Two hours ago, a delegation of elders threw twenty thousand vouchers at Li Xiaoyao’s feet, demanding that we open two additional mining shafts just so their disciples would have more crushed basalt to sweep before the afternoon whistle!"
Austin leaned against the steel railing, taking a measured sip of hot mountain tea from his insulated ceramic mug. He wore his midnight-blue Sovereign Hard Hat, high-visibility orange safety vest, and five-foot Stellar-Steel pipe wrench strapped securely to his back.
"Told you, Tie Kuang," Austin said calmly, wiping a speck of steam from his lip. "Gamers and martial artists are fundamentally the exact same demographic. They crave a daily repeatable quest with a transparent progression curve, real-time visual feedback, and a clear reward loop. You give them a scoreboard on the cavern wall, a warm solar-roasted egg at the end of their run, and a colored cardstock certificate that says they achieved ninety-eight percent sorting efficiency, and they’ll pave your driveway, shovel your aggregate, and pay you for the honor of doing it."
Tie Kuang shook his head in stunned bewilderment. "It defies five thousand years of economic doctrine, Master Austin. The supreme elders of the continent are paying us eight million stones a week to shovel our gravel."
"It’s not shoveling, Tie Kuang. To them, it’s 'The Trial of the Moving Earth Dragon,'" Austin replied with a deadpan smirk. "And as long as they keep their hard hats strapped and stay behind the yellow safety lines, everybody wins. Our aggregate gets sorted to five-millimeter spec, their disciples develop real quadriceps, and our operating ledger stays permanently in the black."
Austin turned away from the railing and glanced out the reinforced observation window toward the sunlit concourse above, where a sprawling line of over four hundred grey-bearded sect masters stretched around the gift shop:
"Speaking of monetization loops, we’d better head up to the retail concourse. Li Xiaoyao sent a runner five minutes ago. Apparently, the high elders have started a bidding war, and the miniature hard hats just went out of stock again."