At dawn, the Lifeline Expedition crossed the final stone boundary marker of Longshan County. That left the realm of mortal great realm behind.
The shift was not a gradual fading of green into brown. It was an abrupt, violent severance of the living world. One moment, the wide iron-oak paddle wheels of the All-Terrain Rolling Slime Barge rolled over dry but arable sandy loam. The next, the earth fractured into a jagged, stone-hard wilderness of black dark rock crags, shattered black glass scree, and yellow sulfur crusts.
The world had become the Scorched Barrens (Jiaotu Huangyuan).
Above, the sky had lost its gentle morning azure. In its place hung a bruised, world-ending canopy of bruised purple and smoldering ochre, choked with drifting plumes of fine fiery grit that obscured the twin suns into two blazing, copper-red discs.
The wind that howled across the barren ridges was not merely dry. It carried the stinging, acid-burning stench of sulfur dioxide, volatilized arsenic vapors, and scorched stone melted rock waste. Every gust blew clouds of powdered foam-stone against the wagon’s heat-treated hull, sounding like a relentless barrage of fine lead shot.
Inside the barge’s enclosed watching cabin, the air was remarkably different.
Lin Xiao had resumed his human avatar—an eighteen-year-old scholar in azure linen robes—sitting comfortably on a woven reed mat at the center of the cabin. His feet were sunk in a shallow, circulating trough of chilled mountain springwater that ran along the floorboards. On a small low table of bitter pine-resin…
