The underground gears roared an octave graver. The jade altar at the center of the pavilion yielded space to a massive steel platform.
The auction master in blood tunics raised his arms, Qi-loaded voice sweeping the glass dome to announce the apex of the local forge. Resting on the metal, an imposing carriage swallowed the lamp light. The entire structure had been sculpted from millennial Ironwood, reinforced with Shadow Steel caps and studded with defensive matrices exhaling a visible static current.
"The Mobile Palace of the Roads!" the auctioneer whipped the hall's acoustics, stoking the elite. "A fortress on wheels. The axle supports the gravity of mountains, and the walls repel continuous attacks from Established Foundation beasts! The opening bid demands ten thousand Inferior-Grade Spirit Stones!"
The figure extirpated the ground-floor scum. Silence strangled the mass of mercenaries, transferring the war purely to the upper vaults.
"Twenty thousand!" the voice distorted by the copper funnel erupted from Booth One. The rustic, dragged tone denounced Patriarch Lín's old lungs.
"Twenty-eight thousand! The Iron River claims this armor!" the young, arrogance-loaded echo exploded from Booth Two.
In Booth Three, Zhì Yuǎn rested his broad back against the phoenix armchair backrest. The carpenter's dark gaze dissected the thickness of the Ironwood and the alignment of the carriage wheels below. The dark armor would shelter the family Forge perfectly beneath the cutting winds of the Far South.
The young man's calloused thumb found the copper funnel on the side of the windowpane. The heavy, golden energy beneath the sternum pulled his vocal cords.
"Thirty-two thousand."
Zhì Yuǎn's grave, dragged voice collapsed from the top of the pavilion. The dry insertion of an anonymous outsider caused a jolt in the hall's inertia.
In Booth Two, the Young Master of the Iron River cracked his knuckles against his own mahogany table. The affront boiled the heir's Dantian. Pulling air with brutality, he ejected his own bid with murderous intent through the metal, masking the venom beneath the varnish of sectarian diplomacy.
"Thirty-five thousand," the heir's gentle voice dripped through the hall matrices. "This junior admires the mountain of wealth of the senior hidden in the third chamber. However, the roads of the Far South charge a dark toll. The winds usually reap solitary travelers, and the gravel of those routes is paved with the crushed bones of the wealthy who travel heavy. I cordially suggest the senior spare his own capital and leave the carriage for those who possess the blade and escort necessary to defend it in the dark of the road."
Inside the silence cocoon of Booth Three, the temperature plummeted.
Crossed on her husband's lap, murderous intent overflowed from Yù Qíng's pores. The humidity of the air in the crystal booth crystallized into fine ice scales on the edges of the crystal windowpane. The young woman straightened her spine, black irises boring in the direction of Booth Two. Her pale nails flexed, prepared to descend the staircases and tear the larynx of the worm that dared threaten her man's territory.
Zhì Yuǎn's immense, calloused hand descended.
The carpenter's palm rested directly over his wife's icy thigh, the unshakeable weight and thermal density of that touch crushing her eruption. The young man's respiratory rhythm remained cemented in its rustic cadence. The corner of his rigid lips curved into a dry, implacable sneer.
Zhì Yuǎn inclined his face toward the copper.
"If the province roads are so dangerous and full of travelers' bones, Young Master," Zhì Yuǎn's unshakeable voice echoed through the auction dome, sharpened purely by pragmatism, "perhaps your Sect should save its own stones in this auction and begin paying a decent wage to your guards to clean the road gravel."
The utilitarian mockery extirpated the heir's threatening aura before the entire dome. Crushing the gap of the other's ego recovery, the outsider's voice threw the currency guillotine.
"Four hundred Medium-Grade Spirit Stones."
The impact smashed the pavilion's acoustics.
Absolute silence asphyxiated the dome. Throwing four hundred purified stones of martial ascension — the condensed fuel the ancient monsters used to break bottlenecks between life and death — against thick wood and forged iron instantly castrated the spine of all local aristocracy. The use of superior currency destroyed any mercenary arithmetic.
The sharp sound of shattered porcelain leaked from the matrices of Booths One and Two, attesting to the tea cups crushed to dust by the trembling phalanges of the humiliated patriarchs. The red-tunicked auctioneer swallowed dry, cold sweat drenching his collar before the raw weight of that transaction, and brought the oak mallet down against stone in a definitive thud, sealing the Mobile Palace for the bored wall of Booth Three.
---
The steel platform descended, and the underground gears turned for the last time that night.
The granite altar rose again, now supporting a black velvet tray. Upon the luxurious fabric, four rustic flasks of cheap ceramic, stained with dry mud and ashes, defied the metropolis's refinement.
Disgust rippled across the ground floor.
"The final lot!" the red-tunicked master roared, neck veins jumping as he projected Qi. "The Golden Essence of Rebirth! A single drop carries the absolute foundation of telluric purification. The opening bid demands eighty thousand Inferior-Grade Spirit Stones per flask!"
The dome plunged into caustic silence, quickly torn by a harsh laugh at the base of the pavilion.
A scarred mercenary leader rose from the second row. The man's aura stagnated at the Eighth Mortal Stage, the Dantian barrier calloused by two decades of impassable bottleneck.
"The pavilion confuses our sweat with dementia!" the mercenary spat on the granite, hand locked on the iron saber hilt. "You charge the treasury of an entire sect for roadside clay and sludge. The demand for proof precedes any silver spill before this farce."
The auctioneer maintained his posture, predatory smile curving the host's lips. The man in red grabbed the first ceramic flask.
"The Pavilion accepts the scrutiny of blood, warrior."
The master's thumb pushed the cork stopper millimeters upward. The minimal crack revealed the seal. An invisible thread of incandescent vapor, saturated with the thick aroma and asphyxiating gravity of the Primordial Gold particle, leaked from the neck. The auctioneer whipped his wrist, hurling the fraction of mist directly against the skeptical mercenary's face.
The dense vapor collided against the man's panting breath. He swallowed the gas.
The anatomy of Ascension smashed the warrior's carcass in real time.
The gaseous Qi stagnated in the mercenary's abdomen suffered an instant gravitational collapse. The force of the invading particle crushed the spiritual mist, grinding the twenty-year barrier in a single heartbeat. The smoke in the Dantian liquefied, transmuting into a dense, liquid, heavy ocean.
The mercenary plummeted to his knees. The impact cracked the jade floor. The veins in the man's neck and arms swelled like thick dark steel cables, pressure pulling the tanned skin. The barometric shock wave of the biomechanical conversion — the violent evolution from Eighth to Ninth Mortal Stage — ejected the smaller fighters from neighboring rows, hurling bodies against wooden chairs in a blunt air explosion.
The man dug his nails into the floor, tears mixed with sweat boiling in the scars of his face. The massive inertia of Void Condensation radiated from his flesh. The absurd miracle was cemented in his own bones.
Animal hysteria swallowed the slaughterhouse. Clan leaders, veteran mercenaries, and sect patriarchs roared in unison, features contorted in lethal possessiveness. Bamboo plaques rose like blades in a blind war, numbers scaling furiously through the dome to drain their own empires before Zhì Yuǎn's dirty water.
---
The funereal quiet of Booth Three remained immutable while the ground floor cannibalized its own dignity. The auction of the water drops extended until Qīngshí's financial reserves entered complete collapse, bleeding the pride of the old lineages.
The echo of the last oak mallet still reverberated in the glass vault when the bronze lock of the sequoia door snapped.
The slender Appraiser crossed the threshold. The man's silk garments were drenched in cold sweat, spine bent in a servile, trembling arc. The merchant's bony hands extended a heavy ebony plaque carved with the pavilion's transfer seals.
"The province's tithe, Sovereign," the man's voice failed, eyes lowered refusing to face the figure beneath the black hat. "The conversion covered the costs of your new carriage. The remaining fortune exceeds the sum of the border imperial coffers in the last three centuries. It is too much weight to be carried in saddlebags. The Consortium is already transferring the stones directly to the vault of your vehicle in the service courtyard."
Without wasting breath on bureaucratic farewells, Zhì Yuǎn rose from the phoenix armchair and retrieved the ebony plaque.
The young man walked to the corner of the booth. His large, calloused hand grabbed the handles of the heavy iron chests holding the Deep Silver Ore and Formation Banners auctioned hours earlier. The Appraiser held his breath, the slender man's legs trembling upon seeing the outsider lift tons of solid metal and accommodate them over his own shoulders with the lethargic ease of one carrying sacks of hay.
Supported by that unshakeable structure, the trio abandoned the VIP chamber, descending through the staircases and internal service corridors of the building.
In the fortified, torch-lit loading courtyard at the back of the pavilion, the Mobile Palace of the Roads awaited them. The Ironwood structure divided into two monolithic, intimidating blocks. In front, the passenger cabin displayed rustic carvings of defensive matrices fed by grooves studded with Qi Stones, emitting a constant static hum projected to shatter Eighth Mortal Stage impacts. At the rear of the reinforced chassis, separated by a thick steel wall, rested the second cabin: a sealed and absolute vault, guarded by the same runic armor.
The copper-scaled draft beasts snorted hot vapor into the cold dawn air, hooves sinking into the limestone due to the gravity of what they pulled.
Dozens of silver-chainmail guards sweated cold, neck tendons pulled to the limit. The soldiers marched panting in an uninterrupted line through the courtyard, carrying heavy iron chests filled with the newly acquired mineral ocean, plus anatomy scrolls, stacking the incalculable wealth directly inside the carriage's rear vault. The dry, oppressive sound of tons of Spirit Stones colliding against each other dictated the material weight of that financial carnage.
When the last chest was accommodated, Zhì Yuǎn locked the thick Shadow Steel door of the deposit with his own hands. The metallic thud sealed the fortune in darkness.
Yù Qíng and Yù Méi boarded the front wooden-and-steel cocoon. The heavy passenger door closed with a hermetic snap, isolating the two in the thermal and silent security of the cabin.
Outside, Zhì Yuǎn assumed the driver's seat. Calloused hands pulled the thick animal-leather reins.
Tied to the Shadow Steel axle, the two draft beasts reacted. They were colossal, aberrant masses of thick muscle, displaying the brutality of primordial oxen fused with reptilian ferocity. Overlapping plates of copper scales, hard as calcified rock, coated the monsters' hide. With every heavy step, the friction of the carapaces rubbing against each other sounded exactly like rusted swords being dragged against whetstones.
The beasts snorted thick jets of scalding vapor through their snouts, melting the cold humidity of the dawn air. Massive hooves crushed the service courtyard limestone, pulling brute force to drag the tons of the Mobile Palace toward the shadows of the road.
The journey required the quietest hours of dawn. The night-cut stretch obliterated time perception. Inside the armored interior, repulsion matrices swallowed the route's imperfections, anesthetizing the women in lethargic quiet.
On the driver's seat, Zhì Yuǎn operated as an unshakeable monolith. The cutting dawn wind shattered against the invisible forge of his chest. The crossing transpired isolated from ambushes or mercenary cries. Only the static of negative space and the hypnotic sway of oak axles crushing gravel accompanied the conductor.
The first cut of orange dawn light sliced the horizon.
The carriage reached the elevation of the summit preceding the descent to the Qīngshān valley.
The broad man pulled the reins with a dry jolt. The beasts' hooves skidded and the wheels halted on the beaten earth of the precipice.
Barometric pressure on the summit plummeted. Zhì Yuǎn's millions of wide-open pores pulled the hillside atmosphere before the sun even illuminated the geography. The wind of that morning exhaled the thick, greasy, corrosive odor of roasted flesh, melted human fat, and secular calcined wood.
Beneath the brim of the black hat, the young man's abyssal irises bored into the valley below.
The vast ocean of green bamboos continued undulating southward, rising impassive as the old natural barrier against the cultivation world. However, the mortal pocket resting on its borders had been eviscerated. The village of Qīngshān had been summarily crushed.
In place of the dozens of houses, stone alleys, and Yù Chéng's great courtyard, smoking craters deformed the terrain. A colossal, thick pillar of black smoke asphyxiated the sky. The soot of shattered beams and carbonized bodies rose in dense, ochre spirals, blocking the rising sun and permeating the wind with the unmistakable ashes of a mass extermination.
The reflection of distant flames danced in the man's cold pupils.
Qīngshān was burning.