Master Bram stayed on his knees, his thick hands trembling as he stared at the frozen hearth.
The sixty-year-old blacksmith looked up at Lin Mo through tear-streaked eyes.
“Utility expenses, Lord Lin?” Bram asked, his voice cracking with despair. “You do not understand the dark sorcery in this furnace. That is not mountain frost. It is abyssal necrotic corpse-oil, chilled to minus two hundred degrees by dark blood-curses!”
“I understand cold weather,” Lin Mo said in his usual even tone. “When a room is cold, you add fuel. If it remains cold, you add better fuel.”
Up on an iron observation catwalk forty feet above the floor, a grating screech echoed across the cavern.
Iron-Baron Magnus and High Inquisitor Vael leaned over the steel railing, glaring down at the group like trapped rats.
“Foolish Easterner!” Vael hissed, his bloodied face twisting with gloating spite. “You may have bought the mountain with gold, but you cannot buy primordial fire! That necrotic ice was brewed from the marrow of a thousand plagued corpses! Normal spirit-coal will only turn to black sludge if it touches that frost!”
Magnus spat over the railing. “The World-Tree Core will rot in that ice within three days! Without the forge fire, your three hundred million spirit stones bought you nothing but a frozen tomb!”
