The midday sun stood at the absolute zenith of the heavens, beating down upon the three-league expanse of the Grand Exhibition Plaza like a molten hammer.
Yet, despite the scorching heat that shimmered over the basalt floor, the mood across the host terraces of Black Tortoise Mountain remained colder than the deepest abyssal frost.
Following Huo Zhen's earth-shaking revelation of the *Three Overlapping Destructive Cycles*, the Second Round had continued in a grinding, suffocating rhythm. Eleven Core Smiths from various regional merchant guilds, vassal clans, and the neutral pavilions had taken their thirty-breath analytical windows beneath the four Frost Jade pillars.
Some had brought spiritual water mirrors to gauge the weapon's cooling rate; others had deployed acoustic resonance bells to measure the harmonic vibration of the flanged ridges.
Yet, without exception, every single one of them had remained trapped within the boundaries of the fire-circulation model that Huo Zhen had projected into the sky.
The scoreboard projected across the clouds of Sacred Flame Peak remained frozen like an iron monument:
*Scarlet Sun Palace: 2 Major Discoveries (Self-Circulating Loop, Three Overlapping Destructive Cycles)*
*Black Tortoise Mountain: 1 Major Discovery (Directional Density Gradient)*
On the southern guest balconies, the atmosphere was practically festive. Disciples of the Scarlet Sun Palace were laughing openly, drinking spiced solar nectar from golden cups, and casting mocking glances toward the silent Black Tortoise terraces. Beside Grand Elder Yan Lie, Chi Yao sat with an air of complete, unbothered supremacy, her slender fingers idly twirling a glowing ribbon of solar fire. To the foreign delegations, the outcome of the gathering was already decided; Black Tortoise Mountain was merely delaying the inevitable humiliation of defeat on its own sacred soil.
Opposite them, on the White Basalt Terrace, Sect Master Xuan Yuan and Grand Domain Smith Elder Duan sat in unmoving, stony silence.
Surrounding them were the veteran Master Smiths and Division Elders of the Heavenly Forge Division—the very same elders who had spent four sleepless days sealed within the subterranean roots of the peak. Beside them, Elder Huo's knuckles were white as his thick hands gripped the stone armrests of his seat. His bloodshot eyes were fixed onto the stage below, his chest heaving with heavy, ragged breaths. He watched his fellow sect members falter one by one, the bitter taste of impending disgrace burning in his throat like sulfur.
*DONG——!*
The ancient bronze bell chimed across the caldera, cutting through the low hum of the crowd.
"The twenty-fourth participant of the Second Round shall step forward," the attendant deacon's voice echoed across the amphitheater, calling down the official registry scroll. "Ironblood Faction of Black Tortoise Mountain, Core Smith Mu Tie!"
The name rippled across the stands with barely a whisper of interest.
In the high VIP lodge, Grand Elder Yan Lie let out a soft, amused scoff, leaning back against his silk cushions. "Ah, the grain-tracing boy from yesterday," Yan Lie remarked to the elders beside him, his voice dripping with condescension. "Let us see if he has discovered that metal becomes hot when placed into fire."
Several Scarlet Sun elders chuckled in agreement, completely dismissing the figure rising from the lower eastern benches.
***
Down in the Ironblood seating, "Mu Tie"—Fang Lin—set down his empty teacup onto the wooden table.
He smoothed down the front of his faded grey disciple robes, brushed a light dusting of furnace soot from his knees, and stood up at an unhurried, relaxed pace.
Beside him, Senior Brother Ma Teng looked up with a tired, defeated sigh. "Go on, Brother Mu. Just do what you did yesterday. Don't push yourself to crack the domain. Just make sure you don't suffer a spiritual rebound."
Fang Lin looked at Ma Teng's dejected face, then glanced up at the high terrace where Elder Huo and the division elders were watching him with a mixture of desperate hope and heavy, unspoken sorrow.
Fang Lin smiled faintly, inclining his head. "I understand, Senior Brother."
Tucking his hands loosely into his wide sleeves, Fang Lin began walking down the wide basalt steps of the eastern stands.
He did not carry a velvet-lined case of heirloom measuring instruments. He wore no glowing spiritual amulets, carried no alchemical cauldrons, and radiated not a single wisp of aggressive spiritual Qi. To the fifty thousand spectators watching the stage, he looked like nothing more than an ordinary, soot-stained smith who had wandered out from a low-tier smelting shed.
Inside his soul sea, the Dark Flame Spirit was sitting cross-legged atop a floating pillar of black fire, its spectral eyes gleaming with intense, razor-sharp anticipation.
*Well, well, kid,* the spirit whispered, its voice tingling with mischievous delight. *The stage is yours. The turtles are crying, the roosters are crowing, and that old fool Yan Lie is practically begging to be slapped across the face with the truth. How are you going to play this?*
*Subtly,* Fang Lin replied with a calm, inward murmur. *The grandest truths in the universe are always the simplest. There is no need for thunder when a whisper can shatter an illusion.*
Fang Lin crossed the threshold of the central platform and stepped between the four pillars of Thousand-Year Frost Jade.
The icy mist radiating from the arrays brushed against his skin, cooling the ambient sulfur heat of the caldera. In the center of the frosted floor, resting upon its dark basalt plinth, lay *Volcanic Annihilation*.
Fang Lin stopped three paces before the mace.
He did not summon nine brass mirrors like Huo Zhen. He did not ignite true flames, nor did he pull out resonance needles.
Instead, Fang Lin took two quiet steps forward, stopped right beside the plinth, and reached out with his bare right hand.
He gently, naturally laid his bare palm flat against the cold obsidian body of the mace.
The entire arena watched in slight confusion.
*He's... touching it directly?*
Every craftsman who had approached the mace today had maintained a cautious distance, using insulated instruments or resonance probes to shield their divine sense from the volatile volcanic heat sealed inside. Touching an unawakened Domain-grade weapon with bare flesh was practically an invitation for the dormant destructive law to scorch one's meridians.
Yet, Fang Lin's hand rested comfortably upon the stone, his breathing steady, his eyes half-closed as if he were simply resting his hand upon an old friend's shoulder.
Beneath the sleeve of his grey robe, Fang Lin's index finger moved with an imperceptible, microscopic twitch.
*Tap.*
His fingernail lightly brushed against the pommel ridge.
It was not an infusion of Core Formation spiritual energy. It was not an aggressive probe. It was a single, pure kinetic frequency—the exact foundational cadence of the seventy-two-thousand hammer strikes he had delivered inside the Ashen Crucible.
*Weng——*
A vibration so faint that no sensory array in the stadium could detect it rippled along the spine of the mace.
In that single instant, the dormant *Gravitational Equilibrium Anchor* inside the obsidian flared in silent recognition. The seventy-two-strike compression matrix, the directional density gradient, and the three overlapping thermal cycles harmonized in absolute, seamless unity beneath his palm.
Fang Lin withdrew his hand.
The entire process had taken less than ten breaths.
Without waiting for the thirty-breath bell to chime, Fang Lin calmly reached into his storage pouch, retrieved a single, unpolished jade slip, and infused a few brief sentences into the stone with his divine sense.
Sealing the jade, Fang Lin turned away from the pedestal and walked up the wide basalt steps toward the White Basalt Terrace.
***
The presiding deacon took the jade slip from Fang Lin's hands with an expression of polite bewilderment.
"Ironblood Faction of Black Tortoise Mountain, Core Smith Mu Tie submits his Second Round treatise," the deacon announced, stepping toward the evaluation array.
Up on the Judgment Council, Grand Elder Yan Lie took a slow sip of his spirit wine, not even bothering to look up from his cup.
The deacon placed the jade slip onto the central array node.
*HUMMM——*
A clean, steady projection of white and golden light flared into the sky above the White Basalt Terrace.
Unlike Huo Zhen's sprawling, multi-layered crimson rings that had filled half the sky with swirling runic calculations, Fang Lin's projection consisted of only two short, plainspoken sentences, hovering quietly in the morning air:
**"The domain was not added to the weapon."**
**"The weapon was forged into a shape that allowed the domain to exist."**
The fifty thousand cultivators in the stadium blinked in absolute confusion.
Disciples in the outer tiers leaned forward, squinting at the two simple lines projected in the clouds.
"What is that?"
"Where are the energy flow diagrams?"
"Where are the resonance formulas? Is he crazy?!"
"Hahaha! Look at what he wrote! 'The domain wasn't added to the weapon, the weapon was forged into a shape that allowed the domain to exist!' What kind of childish nonsense is that?!"
Laughter and mocking chatter began to bubble across the spectator stands, particularly among the disciples of the Scarlet Sun Palace.
In the southern lodge, Grand Elder Yan Lie was just about to set his wine cup down and unleash another wave of booming mockery toward Sect Master Xuan Yuan.
However, before the words could leave Yan Lie's mouth, the laughter died abruptly in his throat.
Yan Lie's eyes locked onto those two simple sentences in the sky.
His crimson pupils dilated to the size of needlepoints. His hand, still holding the golden wine cup, froze completely in mid-air.
Beside him, Chi Yao's haughty smile vanished in an instant, replaced by a sudden, creeping look of absolute incomprehension that slowly morphed into profound, paralyzing shock.
Down on the terrace steps, Fang Lin stood quietly with his hands cupped before his chest.
His voice was calm, steady, and unhurried as he spoke aloud to the silent elders on the Judgment Council:
"Every craftsman from the foreign delegations who has stepped onto this stage has approached this weapon under the exact same foundational assumption: they believe that the master smith first forged an obsidian mace, and then, through complex array formations or external flame loops, infused a Volcanic Eruption Domain into its core."
Fang Lin paused, his dark eyes sweeping across the frozen benches of the Scarlet Sun Palace.
"That assumption is fundamentally wrong."
Fang Lin gestured slightly toward the dark mace resting on the plinth below.
"The domain wasn't added to the weapon. The physical forging process itself—the microscopic compression of the obsidian, the directional density of the grain, the structural alignment of the seventy-two-strike cadence—created the physical and kinetic conditions required for the domain to naturally exist."
Fang Lin lowered his hands, delivering the final, shattering truth with absolute simplicity:
"The weapon was not given a domain. The weapon was forged into a shape that allowed the domain to exist."
***
*Silence.*
Dead, absolute, breathless silence descended over the entire three leagues of the caldera.
The mocking laughter of the Scarlet Sun disciples vanished as if it had been cut by a celestial blade. The murmurs of the fifty thousand spectators in the basalt tiers died instantly into nothingness. The only sound remaining in the entire grand plaza was the low, distant howling of the volcanic wind sweeping across the jagged crater rim.
For ten long, agonizing breaths, not a single person in the stadium dared to breathe.
The foreign grandmasters sitting upon the Judgment Council sat completely paralyzed in their seats.
*The weapon was not forged, then given a domain.*
*The forging created the domain.*
The staggering, revolutionary magnitude of that single distinction crashed into the minds of Grand Elder Yan Lie and the foreign elders like a falling celestial mountain!
For three days, the Scarlet Sun Palace had believed they were winning by mapping the internal fire circulation, treating the mace as a sophisticated thermal engine built around an external flame array.
Yet, this plain, grey-robed youth had just shattered their entire thesis with two sentences!
Huo Zhen had not discovered the secret of the weapon; he had merely mapped the symptoms! The fire, the loops, and the three cycles only existed because the physical, heavy-hammered body of the mace forced them to manifest!
Up on the central terrace, Grand Domain Smith Elder Duan slowly rose to his feet.
Beside him, the seven Master Smiths of the Heavenly Forge Division—including Elder Huo—stood frozen, their mouths open, staring down at "Mu Tie" in utter, thunderstruck disbelief.
During those four grueling days locked behind the nine basalt wards of the Grand Ancestral Forge, these seven elders and Elder Duan had painstakingly verified that the mace possessed zero surface runes and that the domain lived directly within the mineral grain.
It was the most closely guarded secret of Black Tortoise Mountain—a discovery that had cost them days of divine sense exhaustion and kept them awake in endless, passionate debate.
Yet, none of them had known how to articulate the foundational bridge to the continent. They had known *that* the domain was in the grain, but they had struggled to explain how mere heavy-forging could achieve it without looking like an unattainable, mythical miracle.
And now, right before the eyes of the entire continent, an unassuming, soot-stained Core Smith from their own Ironblood Faction had stepped onto the platform, touched the weapon for barely ten breaths, and stated their most closely guarded secret with blinding philosophical perfection!
*He knew?!*
*How could this boy from a remote smelting cave know the very truth that took seven Master Smiths four days behind sealed doors to discover?!*
The seven division elders exchanged wide-eyed, stunned glances, their hearts thumping like war drums.
Beside Elder Duan, Sect Master Xuan Yuan rose slowly, his molten eyes ablaze with triumphant, electrifying light. The heavy cloud of impending defeat that had hung over Black Tortoise Mountain was vaporized in a single instant.
On the southern balconies, Grand Elder Yan Lie's golden wine cup slipped from his frozen fingers, crashing against the polished floor and spilling red nectar across the stone. The proud Grand Elder of the Scarlet Sun Palace sat utterly pale, his mouth slightly open, his entire argument of fire supremacy collapsing beneath the unyielding weight of the heavy hammer.
And on the host terrace, Elder Huo stared down at his quiet disciple, his massive hands trembling, tears of overwhelming, fierce pride blurring his vision.
In the dead, suffocating silence of fifty thousand stunned cultivators, the simple anvil had spoken—and Black Tortoise Mountain had taken back the world.
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