No one would ever know exactly what Yue Yang, Mingzhu, and lightbulb-boy Chimu had discussed in that small tavern.
Even fewer would have guessed it was about to reshape the future balance of power in all of Human Valley.
Mingzhu and Chimu departed that same day. Yue Yang stayed three more days, buying up local specialties in considerable quantity, before flying back to Silver Maple City’s Heavenly Pride Wanderer’s Academy alongside the Principal by airship. Before his departure, Yangping and his companion from Flame Sun City had stopped by once more, slinging insults, trying to needle Yue Yang into formally selecting him as the challenge target for the upcoming Assessment a month away.
“Sure. Have it your way.” Yue Yang’s expression carried the weary indifference of a napping tiger interrupted by two mice squeaking for a duel. Could you possibly be any louder?
Back in Silver Maple City, Yue Yang permitted himself two rare days of genuine rest. Instructors Oumon and Oup were both making steady progress, and the Principal, sensing that the workload ahead would only intensify, decided his prized student needed to recover from the long journey before everything accelerated. He granted Yue Yang a three-day leave to shake off travel fatigue. Nothing worried the Principal more than the thought of his star pupil arriving at the Assessment Ceremony exhausted.
The championship.
It was the single honor the Principal wanted more than anything else.
Even after seeing Jinji’s Strong Magnetic Battle Construct firsthand at the exchange, the Principal’s confidence in their flying battle construct project hadn’t wavered an inch. The Strong Magnetic Battle Construct was, after all, just a construct. The flying battle construct represented an entirely new category of warfare, a complete reimagining of combat itself. There was no real comparison to be made — everyone with eyes could see which path led to lasting success. And what Silver Maple City’s academy had developed went considerably beyond an ordinary flying construct. Reconnaissance type. Combat type. Heavy Assault type. Any single one of these, revealed to the current power structure of Human Valley, would shake it to its foundations.
Two more days passed.
Outside Silver Maple City, the model student Yue Yang requested a day’s leave to personally meet two visiting scholars arriving for academic exchange: Young Lord Mingzhu and Dusk Young Lord Chimu.
If Yue Yang hadn’t explained the reasoning ahead of time, the Principal would have genuinely suspected these two were arriving to steal flying battle construct secrets. But once Yue Yang clarified the situation, the Principal’s mood lifted considerably — with Young Lord Mingzhu of Gem City’s Gem Valley and Dusk Young Lord Chimu of Silver Moon City offering their full backing, his beloved pupil’s championship was practically guaranteed. Both young men were exceptional in their own right, and the powers standing behind them were formidable — territorial powers in Human Valley rivaling, if not exceeding, the Silver Maple City Lord himself.
Most importantly, Yue Yang had been clear about one thing: the two young lords hadn’t come for the flying battle constructs at all. They were here to collaborate on an entirely separate project.
“Mana-liquid gold — upper, middle, and lower grades, all prepared and ready. The rest is up to you.” Mingzhu hadn’t arrived with any fanfare; he’d traveled to Silver Maple City quietly, almost in secret. Chimu, who had arrived a step earlier, had already used considerable funds to acquire a small private estate on the city’s outskirts, establishing it as the trio’s covert research base.
Dozens of fully loaded cargo wagons, disguised as an ordinary trading caravan, had accompanied Mingzhu’s arrival, packed with every variety of material the project would require. The mana-liquid gold itself — far too precious to risk on a wagon — Mingzhu carried personally, sealed within a storage ring.
Convincing his family’s elders had taken considerable time and effort; pulling that quantity of mana-liquid gold out of clan reserves was not the sort of thing that went unquestioned, which accounted for the two-day delay.
“The schematics are complete,” Yue Yang said, looking at Mingzhu with unshakeable confidence. “Better than complete, actually. Original plan was three designs — I’ve finished five. The rune work checks out too; I’ve tested it and confirmed it’s fully viable.” He smiled faintly. “All that’s left is the final step. Manufacturing.”
As he spoke, he handed the schematics over to Mingzhu and Chimu for inspection.
Mingzhu took it reasonably well — he’d come mentally prepared.
Chimu had not. The lightbulb-boy seized the diagrams and stared at them for an extended period, eyes nearly bulging out of his head. “Impossible. This is — this is something that shouldn’t be possible to design at all. How? What exactly is your brain made of? Can I open your skull and have a look — actually, looking at this more closely, it really might be buildable. Am I dreaming? Fine, I admit it — I was skeptical before, I didn’t think this would actually work, how was I supposed to know your head functions like this — wait, hold on, what does this mean? My assigned task is manual labor? Are you implying something about my intelligence? Let the record show, there is nothing wrong with my intellect, and if you don’t assign me something requiring actual brainpower, we are going to have a problem—”
By the time he reached the end of the schematics, Chimu had discovered that his designated role was, in fact, carrying materials around at Yue Yang’s direction. This produced immediate outrage.
He knew perfectly well he couldn’t contribute much technically. But he absolutely refused to settle for being the errand boy.
If everything on these schematics came to fruition, it would be the kind of achievement that echoed through Human Valley’s history for generations. He was not going to allow some future history book to read: In a certain year, Dusk Young Lord Chimu hauled materials with selfless devotion, and through his contribution Baron Titan accomplished an unprecedented feat. Absolutely not. The servant’s role could not appear in his historical record. He needed to be remembered as one of the project’s three founding masterminds — not some forgettable extra who happened to be carrying the lunch boxes.
Chimu nearly shouted that if he wasn’t allowed to actually help, he’d find ways to make trouble instead.
In the end, Yue Yang relented, peeling off a portion of his own workload to hand to the supposedly high-intellect Dusk Young Lord, formally accepting Chimu’s demand to be counted among the project’s three principal masterminds.
Mingzhu didn’t object, though he pursed his lips with mild disdain. “Xiaomu — stick to what you can actually manage. I’m warning you — if you can’t finish your assigned tasks and it throws off the whole timeline, you’ll go down as the man who ruined everything.”
“If I can’t finish, I’ll disembowel myself,” Chimu declared, swearing a blood oath to prove his intelligence wasn’t in question.
“That won’t be necessary,” Yue Yang said gently. “We understand.” He nearly added, it’s not your fault your intellect falls short — but caught himself in time.
“…” Chimu deflated into silence.
When it came to raw intelligence, Chimu generally carried himself with a comfortable sense of superiority — at least compared to people like Gold Leaf City’s Fourth Young Lord Jinji, or Yangping of Flame Sun City, or even Yangping’s older brother, the dignified Young Lord Yangquan. But matched against the back-to-back monstrosities that were Yue Yang and Mingzhu, that comfortable confidence evaporated completely. He had no choice but to concede the field.
That still didn’t mean his intelligence was actually lacking, though.
It was supposed to be quite high.
How had it somehow collapsed into something people pitied?
Chimu privately resolved, no matter what, to prove himself eventually — to reclaim his reputation and demonstrate, conclusively, that he was not some kind of intellectual lightweight.
What followed, as the mana-liquid gold manufacturing process began in earnest, would become a nightmare Chimu would never fully shake for the rest of his life. Mingzhu completed his assigned portion ahead of schedule and with enough capacity left over to monitor Chimu’s progress on the side. Yue Yang, meanwhile — that absolute layabout who had never once lifted a finger for actual labor — needed less than a few minutes to finish work that had taken Chimu several days and was nowhere near done.
And it wasn’t just finished.
It was finished flawlessly.
Flawlessly enough that Chimu seriously considered ending it all against the nearest wall.
“Impossible. This defies logic.” In his entire life, Chimu had never witnessed anything this monstrous. How could a self-professed lazy man simply finish impossibly difficult work in an instant? And it wasn’t even the easy part — Yue Yang had taken the single most technically demanding component of the whole project, the absolute core of it, completed it without apparent effort, and then, almost as an afterthought, casually mopped up the peripheral section Chimu had spent days unable to crack — finishing with an offhand apology that he’d “accidentally” solved it while passing through.
Accidentally, my foot. Nobody “accidentally” does that. This was a public humiliation dressed up as politeness.
“And another thing — if you hadn’t insisted on stealing work that wasn’t yours, this would have been done a full day ago. You absolute fool, you wasted an entire day of our time!” Mingzhu snatched up the golden hammer, fury rising.
“We need solidarity here. Solidarity is strength. We should be loving and supportive of each other—” Yue Yang grabbed Mingzhu’s wrist in a hurry.
“Loving and supportive?” Chimu found something deeply uncomfortable about that particular phrasing.
“You absolute disaster of a person — go dig the holes already, what are you standing around for?” Mingzhu shook Yue Yang’s hand off, apparently absorbing his catchphrases without noticing. The moment “holes” entered the conversation, Chimu rolled up his sleeves at once, declaring himself a hole-digging specialist and demanding the job be handed to him immediately. By this point, Chimu had fully abandoned any ambition of proving his intelligence in front of these two monsters — there was only so much thankless, soul-crushing humiliation a man could volunteer for.
It didn’t take him long to dig ten holes in the small estate’s courtyard.
Not for burying anyone.
Not for planting trees on Arbor Day, either.
For planting puppet battle constructs.
Mingzhu moved next, lowering sufficient energy crystals and auxiliary materials into each hole. The final stage fell to Yue Yang, who dripped carefully measured amounts of varying-grade mana-liquid gold into each pit, then traced elaborate rune patterns of staggering complexity across every hole, large and small.
Like the sun breaking over the horizon, a small radiant sphere began to emerge within each hole, glowing with soft, gentle light.
At first, the light was bearable to look at.
Then it intensified — quickly, relentlessly — until it became too brilliant to face directly.
Chimu had to shield his eyes with his hand. He desperately wanted to watch the whole process unfold, but his eyes simply couldn’t endure that magnitude of light, and he had no choice but to wait, disappointed, for it to fade.
When the brightness finally eased enough to glance over, he discovered that both Mingzhu and Yue Yang had, at some point, donned dark crystal sunglasses, watching the entire transformation unfold in perfect comfort. This sent him into immediate outrage. “That is too much. You’re both calling yourselves the three masterminds and I don’t even get a pair of these?”
Yue Yang laughed. “Didn’t I offer you a pair earlier? You turned it down — I assumed you had some natural resistance to bright light!”
Chimu nearly slapped himself.
Yue Yang had offered, technically — but at the time, desperate to prove his own competence, Chimu had waved it off without thinking. He’d had no idea the offer concerned something this genuinely useful; he’d assumed it was some kind of prank. What a catastrophic waste of an opportunity.
He snatched the sunglasses straight off Yue Yang’s face and put them on himself, mood improving considerably.
By now, the light had nearly faded entirely. Each hole held only a faint golden glow.
The ground, however, began to shake violently. Something in each of the ten pits was straining to break free of the earth.
A puppet arm pushed up through the soil. Then a second. The ground cracked and crumbled as a massive gold-tier puppet construct hauled itself bodily out of the earth, swaying upright. It wasn’t an isolated event — all nine other holes were producing the same spectacle simultaneously, ten constructs of varying size, grade, and combat capability, each clawing its way out of its respective pit one after another.
When the final construct had fully emerged, every one of them moved as a single body.
Stepping forward in unison.
Like a company of knights kneeling before their sovereign, every construct dropped to one knee.
Arranged in perfect, identical formation before Yue Yang, Mingzhu, and a completely dumbstruck Chimu.
“This — this defies logic!” Chimu couldn’t help himself. He had witnessed plenty of impossible things in his life, but never anything quite this impossible. Other people building constructs sweated and bled and wept over years of labor. This man planted them in the dirt and grew them like crops. At this rate, what future was there for Human Valley’s master construct-makers? What future was there for all those self-important young lords swaggering around battlefields with their hard-won creations? This wasn’t a radish patch. You couldn’t simply grow a puppet construct out of a hole in the ground.
And yet, here it was — and he himself, ostensibly one of the project’s three masterminds, had personally participated in creating it.
Since when had he developed this kind of ability?
Clearly, he reasoned, he must be some manner of genius after all.
Chimu turned the question over and over without landing on any other explanation, and finally settled on the only conclusion available: he must be a hidden genius — one even he himself hadn’t fully discovered yet.
(End of Chapter)