The black blood smeared across the golden royal seal flared with sickly emerald flame.
Deep beneath the Hall of Supreme Harmony, the earth screamed.
It wasn’t the mundane grinding of settling foundation stones or the shifting of ancient stonework.
It was the painful, shuddering groan of a wounded underground god.
For a thousand years, the Great Yong royal dragon vein had flowed through the deep granite roots of Tianjing.
In the early dynasties, ancient geomancers had bound the underground vein with cold-iron anchors and white jade channels, guiding earth-heat and fertile earth-breath into the river plains to nourish crops and sustain mortal life.
For the last three hundred years, however, the senile Son of Heaven had perverted that divine plumbing.
To sustain his chimeric fusion with the Dragon of Sins, the Emperor and his eunuchs had choked the underground channels with the blood of carried out scholars, conscript laborers, and slaughtered concubines.
