Lu Chen kicked through the shattered bronze trapdoor at the top of the stairs. He stepped out into the open air of the royal core.
His iron-rimmed boots came down upon the vast, white stone expanse of the Terrace of Supreme Harmony.
A howling wind swept across the raised terrace, but it brought no freshness.
The air was dense with the stench of rancid dragon animal fat, scorched incense. The coppery tang of stale blood that had seeped into the stone over four hundred years.
Above the Forbidden City, the sky was not blue.
A thick, swirling canopy of yellow-grey smog hung low over the palace roofs, choked with the soot of underground offering hearths and the toxic breath of the dragon vein.
Lu Chen paused on the southern edge of the terrace, surveying the ground before him.
The stone-built scale was huge.
