Junior Inquisitor Bai Ze stood upon the deck of his mother-of-pearl dory, his hands trembling with a rage so profound that it threatened to rupture his seventh-stage nascent soul.
His sacred trident—a treasure forged from ancient star-iron by the venerable foundry elders of the Upper Firmament—was currently sitting in an unpainted metal pipe rack twenty thousand feet below, being eyed by a mortal blacksmith with an oil rag and a bastard file.
"Inquisitor..." Acolyte Chen stammered, clutching the shattered fragments of his ivory sextant to his chest. "The mortal... he took your weapon. He filed its casting burrs. And now... he is climbing the vertical ladder with a metal clipboard and a heavy iron lever!"
"Silence!" Bai Ze shrieked, spatters of celestial blood misting from his lips. "Deploy the Void Extinction Array! All three vessels, link your spirit engines! We shall not dirty our hands with physical combat against these soil-born apes! We shall unleash the Black Ray of Absolute Annihilation and dissolve this entire mountain into dust and ash!"
The two flanking silver dories glided into an inverted delta formation.
At the prows of all three vessels, silver astrological rings began to spin at three thousand revolutions per minute. Intricate spatial formations lit up along their hulls, drawing vast quantities of cold, dark-matter energy from the void beyond the firmament. A ball of pitch-black, light-devouring plasma condensed between the three ships, crackling with anti-spatial discharges that tore jagged, hairline rifts in the atmosphere.
Down on the twenty-two-thousand-foot staging spar, Austin climbed the last three rungs of the aluminum access ladder, stepped onto the cantilevered catwalk, and clipped both of his shock-absorbing lanyard hooks onto the designated static lifeline.
*CLACK. CLACK.*
He checked the double-locking gates with his thumb. Fully seated. One-hundred percent tie-off maintained.
Then he reached into his tool belt, pulled out his yellow grease pencil, and flipped his aluminum clipboard to a blank, triplicate Incident Report Form.
He looked up through his Shade-14 welding goggles at the three hovering moon-boats.
The black ball of void plasma was now six feet in diameter, emitting a high-frequency, ear-splitting whine that sounded like a million dry gears grinding together without lubricant. The air around the vessels distorted into an oily, prismatic haze, and the ambient temperature on the catwalk plummeted fifteen degrees in two seconds.
Austin squinted at the energy buildup, his brow furrowing beneath the brim of his hard hat.
"Unshielded high-voltage cathode discharge," Austin muttered, shaking his head with deep professional disgust. "No arc-flash boundary marked. Zero localized containment shielding. The incident energy on that emitter has to be at least forty calories per square centimeter. If an apprentice walked within twenty feet of that without a Category 4 arc-flash hood, their polyester shirt would fuse directly to their ribs."
He unholstered his electric megaphone, aimed it at the lead vessel, and squeezed the grip.
*SKREEEEEE-CLICK.*
"ATTENTION OPERATORS OF THE THREE UNREGISTERED MOON-VESSELS," Austin’s flat, amplified voice boomed across the thirty-thousand-foot drop. "YOU ARE CURRENTLY GENERATING AN OPEN HIGH-ENERGY PLASMA ARC IN PROXIMITY TO STRUCTURAL ASTRAL-TITANIUM MEMBERS WITHOUT AN ACTIVE HOT-WORK PERMIT. NFPA STANDARD 51-B STRICTLY MANDATES A THIRTY-FIVE-FOOT CLEAR RADIUS FREE OF COMBUSTIBLE MATERIALS, AN ON-DUTY FIRE WATCH WITH A CERTIFIED TEN-POUND ABC DRY-CHEMICAL EXTINGUISHER, AND DOCUMENTED PRE-HOT-WORK RISK ASSESSMENTS."
High above, Bai Ze did not even know what an ABC dry-chemical extinguisher was, but the mere sound of the mortal’s monotonous, unimpressed voice drove him completely over the edge of sanity.
"DIE, YOU INSOLENT WORM!" Bai Ze roared, slashing his hand downward. "VOID EXTINCTION RAY—OBLITERATE!"
The three spinning astrological rings locked into alignment.
*BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAP!*
A beam of solid, pitch-black void energy erupted from the focal point between the three ships. Twelve inches thick and pulsing with the gravitational fury of a collapsing miniature black hole, the ray tore downward through the atmosphere, vaporizing the high-altitude air molecules and leaving a vacuum tunnel in its wake.
It was aimed dead-center at Austin’s chest.
On the platforms below, twelve hundred cultivators screamed in terror, covering their faces.
Austin didn't scream. He didn't even drop his clipboard.
Instead, he took one measured step forward on the four-inch wide titanium beam. With his left hand, he casually clamped his clipboard under his armpit. With his right hand, he unslung the five-foot cast-titanium pipe wrench from his shoulder.
Inside his dantian, the twin binary stars flared with ten exawatts of Roche lobe thermonuclear power.
`GRAVITATIONAL PRE-LOAD: 45.0G.` `MASS MOMENT OF INERTIA: ACTIVE.` `CURRENT DRAW: NOMINAL.`
As the black void ray slammed down toward his face, Austin didn't dodge.
He raised the five-foot titanium pipe wrench, angled the forged, serrated lower jaw at forty-five degrees, and stepped smoothly into the strike like a master plumber tightening a stubborn three-inch gas union.
*CLANG!*
The serrated teeth of the pipe wrench bit directly into the core of the black void ray.
To the laws of mortal physics and high-cultivation daoism alike, a physical titanium hand tool should have been atomized instantly into subatomic quarks. But Austin’s pipe wrench was not merely forty pounds of metal; it was an extension of Austin’s Level 70 frame-dragging gravitational well, backed by seven hundred pounds of certified lead counterweight and the crushing inertia of two orbiting stars.
The concentrated beam of spatial annihilation hit the wrench's jaw—and found itself trapped within Austin’s localized gravitational domain.
The black plasma didn't detonate. It couldn't expand. The 45.0G gravity well forced the stream of high-energy spatial particles to follow the conductive contour of the titanium tool.
"Ungrounded current," Austin grunted, his boots flexing against the beam. "Rule Number One of electrical safety: always give current an easy path to ground."
With a sharp, ninety-degree flick of his wrist, Austin slammed the heel of the wrench against the massive four-inch-thick solid copper lightning down-conductor running vertically down the spine of the tower’s primary column.
*BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT-CRACKLE!*
A blinding flash of violet-orange electricity illuminated the clouds.
The ten-exawatt void beam was shunted entirely away from the staging deck and funneled directly into the solid copper busbar. The current roared down the twenty-thousand-foot cable at the speed of light, bypassing the lattice structure entirely and plunging deep into the bowels of Sunset Peak.
Four hundred meters below the surface, on Subterranean Floor 9, the heavy-duty capacitor banks hummed with ecstatic joy.
The giant analog voltmeter dials on the forty-foot switchboard spun clockwise like roulette wheels.
`CAPACITOR BANK RESERVE: 64.2% ──> 99.8% (+35.6% SURGE CAPTURE).` `GRID STATUS: FULLY TOPPED OFF.` `ESTIMATED SAVINGS: 840,000 SPIRIT STONES IN PEAK-DEMAND DIESEL CHARGES.`
Down on Floor 1, the high-speed passenger hoist elevator suddenly chimed with a cheerful electronic tone, its interior LED lights glowing fifteen percent brighter as it ascended the mountain with frictionless ease.
High above, at the twenty-two-thousand-foot spar, the black beam sputtered and died, its entire reserve of destructive spatial energy swallowed by a four-inch copper grounding rod.
Junior Inquisitor Bai Ze stood on the deck of his dory, his hands outstretched, his jaw trembling.
"Where... where did the Void Extinction Ray go?" Bai Ze whispered, staring into the empty sky. "It... it vanished! Did it incinerate the heavens?!"
A heavy metallic shadow fell over the dory’s bow.
Austin was standing on the uppermost outrigger beam, barely six feet away from the ship's mother-of-pearl prow, having ridden a counterweighted hoist cable up the final two thousand feet.
He was holding his aluminum clipboard in his left hand and his five-foot titanium pipe wrench resting casually across his right shoulder. Behind his Shade-14 goggles, his eyes were cold, narrowed, and brimming with the terrifying wrath of a municipal code enforcement officer who had just found sixteen unpermitted electrical splices behind a homeowner's drywall.
"You've got three seconds to shut down those anti-gravity thrusters and step out of the vehicle," Austin said, his voice deadly quiet.
Bai Ze shrieked like a startled falcon. "DEMON! INSECT! YOU DARE STAND BEFORE AN INQUISITOR OF THE UPPER FIRMAMENT—"
*SWISH.*
Austin didn't wait for him to finish the sentence.
He swung the five-foot pipe wrench through a short, tight horizontal arc. The flat side of the heavy forged tool head struck the moon-pearl prow of the flagship dory with the polite, decisive authority of a municipal tow-truck driver tapping a booted tire.
*CLAAAAAAANG!*
The impact rang across thirty thousand feet of empty sky like a cathedral bell.
Forty-five gravities of kinetic mass, combined with ten exawatts of core torque, transferred cleanly into the dory’s structural frame.
The mother-of-pearl hull didn't shatter—Austin had calibrated the swing strictly for mechanical deflection, not demolition—but the ship's internal anti-gravity gyroscopes experienced twelve hundred Gs of lateral acceleration in three milliseconds.
*WHEEEEEEEE-POP!*
The delicate astral-silver gyros inside the engine housing instantly tripped their spiritual circuit breakers. The silver anti-gravity runes went completely dark.
The flagship dory spun horizontally like a dropped ceramic dinner plate, its mother-of-pearl hull whistling through the air as it began to fall toward the clouds at terminal velocity.
"MY SHIP!" Bai Ze screamed, clawing at the silver floorboards as the spinning force plastered him flat against the starboard railing. "THE ENGINE IS DEAD! WE ARE DESCENDING! WE ARE FALLING INTO THE DIRT!"
"Tie Kuang!" Austin called calmly into his radio, watching the dory tumble through the lower cumulus deck. "Clear the southwest corner of the visitor gravel lot. We've got an unpermitted celestial craft conducting an emergency dead-stick landing. Lay down some sandbags and have Xiaoyao waiting with the towing invoice."
"Understood, Master!" Tie Kuang’s booming voice crackled through the speaker. "The sandbags are deployed! Brother Xiaoyao has his grease pencils sharpened!"
Austin turned his gaze to the remaining two silver dories, which were hovering fifty feet away.
The acolytes aboard those two ships were frozen in sheer, paralyzed horror. They looked at the twenty-thousand-foot titanium tower. They looked at Austin’s five-foot pipe wrench. Then they looked down through the hole in the clouds, where their commander was spinning toward the mortal earth like a kicked pinecone.
Austin raised his yellow grease pencil, pointed it directly at the two remaining vessels, and gestured with his thumb toward the lower mountain.
"Down," Austin said simply. "First gear. Follow your boss to the gravel lot. If you try to jump to hyperspace in my hoisting zone, I will personally unbolt your rudders with a thirty-two-millimeter socket."
The two acolytes didn't hesitate for a single microsecond.
With frantic, sobbing bows, they slammed their steering rudders forward, cutting their thruster output to five percent, and glided meekly down through the cloud break behind their tumbling commander.
Austin let out a slow, tired breath.
He pulled the Incident Report Form from his clipboard, clicked his ballpoint pen, and began checking off boxes with meticulous precision.
`VIOLATION 1: Unauthorized operation of motorized craft within a designated crane-swing radius.` `VIOLATION 2: Discharging uncontained hazardous high-energy plasma without an NFPA 51-B Hot-Work Permit.` `VIOLATION 3: Failure to yield right-of-way to active construction hoisting personnel.` `PENALTY ASSESSMENT: 150,000 Spirit Stones impound fee + 40 hours of mandatory high-altitude safety training.`
"Amateurs," Austin grumbled, pocketing his pen. "Every single season, it's the same thing. Nobody reads the site signage."
He turned back toward the main tower mast, where the sun was finally sinking below the western clouds, painting the sky in glorious shades of amber and rose.
From high above, at the thirty-thousand-foot level where the tower’s upper framing would soon rise, a cold, playful mountain wind brushed across Austin’s cheek.
And from down below, riding the open steel elevator cage as it ascended to the twenty-thousand-foot deck, came the unmistakable, enthusiastic barking of an eight-hundred-pound three-headed pug.