At the western edge of the civilized world, the ground simply stopped.
The Land-wide Border Rift cut across the land like a saw mark, fifty miles wide and ten miles deep. Cold violet light flickered below. Wind rushed up from the darkness, carrying the smell of ozone and crushed stone. Anyone who fell would not merely die. Their spiritual body would come apart and scatter into the void.
The Heaven-Reaching Promontory jutted over the drop. Wind and grit had worn its black rock smooth.
At its tip stood the Immortal Void Gate.
The bronze gate rose one hundred feet and spanned sixty. Huge pins fixed it to the bedrock. Decorative dials covered its face, carved with rings, stars, and faded runes. Counterweights hung inside the casing, their cables disappearing into dark bronze tubes.
Royal scrolls called it the Threshold of the First Gods. According to legend, the three moons aligned once every hundred years and released the ancient lock. Only then could ninety-nine chosen prodigies enter with Void Spirit Jade Tokens and search for lost techniques, divine pills, and immortal inheritances.
The next alignment was seventy-two hours away.
Fifty thousand cultivators had gathered to wait. Three hundred sects, righteous and demonic alike, covered the promontory with tents.
Silk pavilions stood beside bloodstained war banners. Incense and burning spirit herbs filled the air. Golden Core elders sat on velvet mats and pretended the cold wind did not make their joints ache. Young prodigies argued around bronze star wheels and covered slate tablets with calculations.
Sword disciples guarded each camp. Anyone who came too close received a drawn blade and a hard stare. Old grudges hung over the crowd. Everyone knew the fighting would grow worse once the ninety-nine places opened.
Then a new sound came from the eastern road.
RUMBLE-CLACK.
No dragon roared. No heavenly bell rang. It was only rubber tires striking stone, followed by the panting of many animals.
Elders opened their eyes. Young masters stopped arguing. Guards turned toward the pass.
Sixty Blood-Eyed Shadow Jackals raced out of the canyon at thirty miles an hour.
These were the same beasts that had dragged three merchant caravans into the shadow realm the previous autumn. Now they ran in five rows of twelve, wearing padded harnesses. Their tongues hung out, and their tails swung with their strides.
They pulled Austin’s steel cart straight through camp. Red dust blew over the Heavenly Dao Alliance’s silk awnings.
Austin sat on the bench with his tea in one hand. His five-foot Stellar-Steel pipe wrench lay across his lap. Xiaoyao jogged beside him with the surveyor’s tripod, staring at the camps like a farm boy at a fair.
Pug followed with the packs and the First Epoch server. His three heads surveyed the fifty thousand cultivators with the bored expression of a dog walking past a chicken yard.
“Whoa, boys.”
Austin pulled the handbrake. The brake pads gripped the disc with a hiss, and the cart stopped beside the main hitching rail.
He climbed down, released the harness, and emptied a half-barrel of boiled pork scraps onto the stone.
“Good run. Take thirty. Don’t chew the traces, and don’t bite the tourists.”
He scratched the alpha behind its scarred ear, then knelt to inspect its paws. He removed two pieces of shale and checked for burns. The other jackals sat and waited their turn at the food tub.
Silence spread across the promontory.
Tea stopped halfway to open mouths. Bronze instruments slipped from numb fingers. Even the wind seemed to quiet.
“Are my eyes failing?” an elder of the Heavenly Dao Alliance whispered. “He put sixty Blood-Eyed Shadow Jackals in harness?”
A demonic sect master backed away from Pug. “Those heads. Those black scales. That is a sovereign beast of the Nether Sun!”
Pug sniffed a skewer of spirit-serpent meat on the man’s grill. He sneezed, and a stray puff of solar heat reduced the grill to white ash.
The sect master retreated until he struck his own tent pole.
A young master pointed at Austin. “What is he wearing? A crown of seamless blue alloy! Robes of indigo void-hemp! And look at the objects circling his boots!”
Another man stared at the pipe wrench. “That stepped jaw must be an ancient sealing relic!”
Austin ignored them. He was studying the camp, and every new detail made him angrier.
“Open fires beside silk tents,” he said. “No sand buckets. No fire lane. Forty tents blocking the main way out. If one tarp catches, fifty thousand people will trample each other straight over the cliff.”
Xiaoyao opened his notebook. While Austin examined the gate, the boy walked the camp lanes. He marked three broad routes on solid rock, two dead ends, and the places where guy ropes narrowed the crowd’s path. He also drew the hitching rail, the water barrels, and a bare strip of ground beside the eastern stair.
Austin looked over the page when he returned. “Good notes. If people start running, don’t stand in front of them. Give them somewhere safe to go.”
An elder from the Violet Cloud Pavilion stepped forward. “Impudent youth! This is the sacred camp of the righteous alliances!”
Austin glanced at the glowing talisman cords tangled around the man’s feet. One end lay in a puddle of spilled tea.
“Watch your step, grandpa. You’ve got five hundred volts of spiritual current leaking into that puddle. One wet sole and your Golden Core gets grounded. Clean up your cables.”
The elder sputtered, but Austin had already walked away.
He took his binoculars to the edge of the promontory and examined the gate. He moved the lenses over the lintel, the jambs, and the huge carved gears.
“Green corrosion on the supports. Bearings that haven’t seen grease in ten thousand years. Grit packed into every moving part.” He lowered the binoculars. “No maintenance schedule. No logs. Whoever approved this installation should have lost his license.”
Xiaoyao set up the tripod beside him.
“Senior Chu, the ancient texts say the gate will wake when the three moons reach their zenith in seventy-two hours. Only then will it admit the ninety-nine chosen prodigies.”
Austin looked from the gate to the thousands of people sitting in the cold wind.
“They’re sleeping in the dirt for three days because of the moon?”
“Yes, Senior. The records say only the gravitational alignment can break the seal of the First Gods.”
Austin rubbed his neck. Then he pointed his grease pencil at a clean, box-shaped seam near the bottom-right corner of the gate.
“Xiaoyao, that isn’t an immortal portal. It’s a heavy-duty emergency fire exit.”
Xiaoyao tilted his head. “A fire exit?”
“The dials are decoration. The real latch responds to temperature. The bronze expands in the heat and binds in its tracks. When the moons align, their shadow cools the face. The metal contracts, the latch pins pull free by four thousandths of an inch, and the lock releases.”
Xiaoyao stared at him. “The sacred conjunction is a… cooling cycle?”
“Basically. Somebody turned a thermal joint into a religious holiday.” Austin tapped his clipboard. “And any proper fire door has a manual override so maintenance workers don’t get trapped inside. You don’t need three moons for that. Grab the level and the toolbox. Let’s go scan the badge.”