The front entrance of the **Sunset Peak Official Souvenir Gift Shop** was experiencing what municipal retail planners and emergency crowd-control marshals universally classify as a Class-4 Commercial Stampede.
A snaking queue of more than five hundred Golden Core and Nascent Soul elders—venerable masters who routinely commanded imperial armies, obliterated mountain ranges with a wave of their sleeves, and spent centuries meditating on lonely frost-covered peaks—were currently wedged between rows of aromatic cedar display shelving. Each of them clutched heavy silk pouches of purple spirit crystals and thick stacks of Sunset Peak Vouchers with desperate, manic urgency.
"Three thousand high-grade spirit stones for the miniature Sovereign Helmet!" bellowed Grand Elder Lei of the Thunder Cloud Sect, slamming a velvet sack of glistening amethyst gems onto the polished cedar counter with enough force to vibrate the display racks. "Stand aside, you river-dwelling peasant! I must have that blue crown! My grandson’s Foundation Realm breakthrough is tomorrow morning! If he wears the Sacred Blue Dome during his tribulation, the heavenly lightning will glance harmlessly off his skull! It is written in the sacred pamphlets: *High-Density Polyethylene Deflects All Vertical Impact!*"
"Out of my way, Lei, you thunder-addled barbarian!" barked Sect Master Han of the Flowing River Pavilion, shoving his elbow forward while frantically untying his spatial pouch. "I will pay six thousand for the Sovereign Helmet, and I will take the last two remaining Branded Hexagonal Yellow Grease Pencils! The grease pencil contains the crystallized ancient wax of cosmic order! With it, my sect's grand architects shall draft blueprints of our new ancestral palace with absolute zero-point-one millimeter planar alignment! If the foundation footing is not plumb, the spiritual leylines will bleed qi into the topsoil! Hand them over!"
"Seven thousand!" screamed an elder from the Iron Sword Sect, waving a signed promissory note backed by an entire iron mine. "I need the Toy Stellar-Steel Pipe Wrench! Its balanced jaw geometry embodies the Heavenly Dao of Opposing Torque! With it, I can unlock the rotational bottlenecks of my internal meridians!"
Behind the reinforced cedar checkout counter, Li Xiaoyao was operating the brass manual cash register with a blur of hand seals that would have put grandmaster illusionists to shame.
*CHA-CHING! CLATTER-CLINK!*
*BEEP! CRACKLE-SNAP!*
"Honored elders! Supreme Patriarchs! Please maintain orderly single-file queuing within the velvet stanchions!" Xiaoyao shouted at the top of his lungs, his blue linen uniform crisp and his brass *Chief Guest Experience Officer* badge gleaming brilliantly beneath the overhead LED track lighting. "All commemorative Sovereign Helmets are strictly limited to one per registered customer ticket! Toy Stellar-Steel Pipe Wrenches are certified non-combat display memorabilia! Sunset Peak Contracting accepts zero civil liability if you attempt to parry heavenly thunderbolts or high-tier sword qi with unreinforced high-density polyethylene!"
"Lies! Pure modesty from the Sovereign's emissary!" Grand Elder Lei shouted back, his eyes bloodshot with avarice. "I saw the Sovereign deflect the divine wrath of the Crusader Alliance while wearing that very shade of sapphire headwear! Wrap it in protective bubble wrap at once, boy, or I shall double my bid!"
Despite Xiaoyao’s frantic administrative warnings, the display shelves were being looted by eager buyers faster than an excavation crew could dig a drainage ditch.
The three hundred miniature blue hard hats—each molded from dyed yellow and blue plastic, complete with an adjustable internal webbing suspension strap—were wiped out in exactly twenty-two minutes. Sect masters clutched them to their chests like newborn infants, inspecting the embossed *SUNSET PEAK CONTRACTING* logo with tearful reverence.
The four hundred pairs of Shade-5 Emerald Safety Spectacles vanished in under a quarter of an hour. Patriarchs shoved them onto their aged faces, peering through the dark green polycarbonate lenses and gasping in holy ecstasy.
"Look! Look through the sacred green crystal!" an elder of the Azure Cloud Sect cried out, trembling as he pointed toward the ceiling fixtures. "The blinding glare of the artificial sun-tubes is muted into absolute, gentle harmony! Mortal eyes can gaze upon the luminous majesty of the Heavens without suffering retinal burn! These are not mere spectacles—these are the *Eyes of the Unblinded Void*! Five hundred vouchers was a pittance!"
The one thousand branded yellow grease pencils—simple wax sticks wrapped in peel-off paper tape—were stripped down to the bare wooden display pegs. Outside in the courtyard, rogue cultivators who had missed the initial rush were openly bartering five-hundred-year-old blood ginseng roots and high-grade flying talismans just to purchase two-inch discarded grease pencil stubs from lucky disciples.
And over at the central warming bins, the disaster was absolute.
The entire morning batch of twelve hundred solar-roasted eggs had completely evaporated. The insulated brass trays sat empty, radiating only a lingering, mouth-watering aroma of toasted farm butter, cracked pepper, and rich thermonuclear vitality. A circle of thirty high-ranking alchemy elders stood around the empty warmer, sniffing the remaining air with expressions of inconsolable grief.
"Gone..." one venerable alchemist wept into his beard. "The sacred golden ovum... the only pill in the three realms that strengthens the marrow without creating toxic medicinal dregs... gone until tomorrow's dawn..."
By two o'clock in the afternoon, Li Xiaoyao had no choice. With his voice hoarse and his cash drawer jammed to the brim with purple crystals, he stepped out to the front entrance, turned the brass deadbolt, and hung a laminated sign upon the reinforced glass door:
A collective groan echoed across the Obsidian Plaza, sounding like the death rattle of an entire imperial dynasty.
Inside the locked back office, the atmosphere was a stark contrast to the frenzy of the showroom floor.
Superintendent Tie Kuang was seated behind a heavy ironwood drafting desk. Around him stood four towering steel-reinforced cedar vaults, their doors propped wide open because they were literally overflowing with glowing purple spirit crystals, compressed jade bullion, and banded stacks of blue-and-gold municipal vouchers.
In Tie Kuang’s hands, his mechanical brass abacus was practically smoking. The iron beads clicked with furious, rhythmic urgency as he verified the final tallies of the afternoon run.
*Click-click-clack. Clack-click.*
The office door creaked open. Austin stepped inside, his steel-toed boots making a solid, measured *thud* on the sealed floorboards. He wore his midnight-blue hard hat pushed back slightly on his brow, his orange safety vest unzipped to let the cool mountain draft circulate through his work shirt.
"Tie Kuang," Austin said, pulling a cold ceramic bottle of spring water from a small cooler by the door. "Sounded like a riot out there. Did the glass doors hold up?"
Tie Kuang slowly lifted his head. His eyes were wide, glassy, and completely unmoored from reality:
"Master Austin... the reinforced polycarbonate doors held. But our accounting balance has broken through all known bounds of human mathematics. Today's retail gross revenue... in four hours and twelve minutes... was one million, four hundred and eighty thousand high-grade spirit stones."
Tie Kuang swallowed hard, pointing a trembling, ink-stained finger at the overflowing vaults:
"We sold out of every single piece of injection-molded plastic in the storage annex. We sold out of every grease pencil, every roll of yellow boundary tape, every souvenir brass keychain stamped with your likeness, and every egg laid by the mountain poultry coops. Masters of the Dao—men who have meditated on mountaintops for six centuries without uttering a word—were shoving each other into display cases to buy three-inch plastic helmets!"
Austin unscrewed the cap of his water bottle and took a long, steady drink, entirely unfazed.
"The demand curve for high-visibility personal protective equipment is completely inelastic, Tie Kuang," Austin replied in a calm, analytical tone. "I’ve seen it a hundred times on commercial sites back home. You give a guy a three-hundred-dollar pair of composite-toed work boots and a calibrated torque wrench, and suddenly he walks ten percent taller. In this world, cultivators are terrified of random tribulation lightning, falling cave-in rocks, and meridian blowouts. When they realize that a four-dollar plastic shell and a foam suspension harness prevents a four-thousand-dollar medical skull reconstruction, supply will never catch up with demand."
He pulled his yellow grease pencil from behind his ear and stepped over to the drafting table, tapping the wooden surface:
"We need to eliminate this inventory bottleneck immediately. Retail backorders create secondary scalper markets, and scalpers ruin customer satisfaction scores. Here’s the action plan: route fifty kilowatts from our auxiliary battery bank down to Floor Two’s light manufacturing bay. Tell the tooling crew to mill a second automated injection-molding production line with an eight-cavity hardened aluminum mold. We need to bump daily output to two thousand miniature hard hats by tomorrow afternoon."
Tie Kuang scribbled the orders onto his clipboard with frantic speed. "Understood, Master! What about the grease pencils?"
"Tell the chemical mixing vat on Floor Three to double the paraffin wax and yellow pigment emulsion batch," Austin instructed smoothly. "And go down to the surface poultry coops. Tell the farm hands to double the laying hens' crushed limestone and grain rations. We need at least three thousand eggs prepped and loaded into the solar warming bins by zero-six-hundred."
"Right away, Master Austin!" Tie Kuang declared, snapping his inspection binder shut.
Just then, a deep, resonant rumble vibrated through the floorboards from the far corner of the office.
*HUUUUUUUUUUUUURRRRRRRR-SNNNNOOOOOOOOORRRRKK.*
Austin glanced over.
In the corner, sprawled atop a comfortable mountain of flattened cardboard shipping boxes, lay Cerberus Pug.
The eight-hundred-pound three-headed terror was completely passed out in blissful, horizontal exhaustion. His red-and-white striped *GRILL MASTER* apron was tied loosely around his broad ribcage, stained with stray splatters of barbecue marinade and butter. All three of his massive, wrinkled black-and-tan heads were snoring in a synchronized three-part harmonic rhythm: the left head let out a low whistling bass drone, the center head exhaled a shuddering snort, and the right head produced a soft, rhythmic clicking wheeze.
Scattered around the base of the cardboard boxes were twelve empty wicker baskets that had previously contained eighty pounds of cured spiced beef jerky—tributes and bribes lovingly hand-fed to the hound by terrified sect elders who believed that appeasing the Three-Headed Solar Arbiter would grant their bloodlines celestial favor.
Austin walked over to the boxes, his boots squeaking softly on the clean linoleum. He leaned down and gave all three sets of velvety ears a thorough, vigorous scratching.
"Good shift, Pug," Austin said softly, a rare glimmer of warmth in his eyes. "You greeted five hundred high-level sect masters, kept the queue moving, didn't bite a single grand elder through his silk trousers, and ate eighty pounds of premium protein. You earned your holiday bonus."
At the sound of Austin’s voice, Pug’s center head opened one heavy, dark brown eye. His curly, pug-like tail gave two slow, contented thumps against the corrugated cardboard:
*Thump. Thump.*
The hound let out a massive, rumbling sigh of doggy satisfaction, rested its heavy jowls back onto its paws, and drifted right back into deep, peaceful slumber.
Austin straightened up, adjusting the tool belt resting across his hips. He walked over to the back office window and looked out across the valley.
High above the crags, the Second Sun hung suspended in the cobalt sky, radiating a steady, blinding warmth. But deep beneath Austin’s breastbone, something within his own internal core responded to the sun's brilliance.
A deep, harmonic vibration—like the distant spooling of a massive, unthrottled turbogenerator—hummed through his ribs and resonated through the timber framing of the lodge. The immense volume of spiritual circulation, material flow, and economic energy funneling into Sunset Peak was concentrating into an irresistible gravitational vortex within his dantian.
The seasonal capstone was no longer merely approaching.
It was knocking at the door.
Austin tapped his grease pencil against his hard hat, feeling the sudden, familiar tickle of gravitational flux tugging at the lead weights along his belt.
"Tie Kuang," Austin said quietly, his voice dropping into absolute professional focus. "Clear the front porch and set up the calibration levels. My internal reactor is about to breach its final main sequence threshold."