Lu Chen emerged from the smoking mouth of the upright shaft, his boots landing with a heavy, metal thud upon the fractured granite lip of the eastern hill.
Behind him, the great tumulus of the First Emperor’s tomb hall was concave, collapsed inward like an empty eggshell.
Billowing plumes of white steam and sulfur soot rose into the predawn sky from fissures that ran deep into the mountain roots.
The ancient, choking pall of corpse-frost that had hung over the eastern tombs for three hundred years had vanished.
In its place was a dry, blazing bright wind.
Lu Chen stood on the hillside, his six-foot-one frame outlined against the eastern horizon.
Over the jagged ridges of the distant mountains, the first rim of the morning sun broke through the clouds.
It wasn’t the pale, sickly yellow light of an empire drowning in the Uncanny.
