The six-inch-thick bronze slab gave way with an ear-splitting, metal groan.
Lu Chen drove the heel of his iron-soled boot into the fractured seam.
CRACK—BOOM.
The ancient lock gearwork, forged from sky cold-iron and sealed with lead three hundred years ago, snapped into jagged shrapnel.
The two halves of the double door swung inward, crashing against the inside walls of the underground vault.
A blast of stale, freezing air rushed out of the dark.
It smelled of thousand-year-old bitter pine-resin wax, stone-hard dragon animal fat. The dry, desiccated dust of stone that had not seen a mortal breath in hundreds of years.
Beneath that ancient stillness, however, Lu Chen’s test senses caught something else: the faint, metal rot of the royal dragon vein decaying in the depths below.
