The grand canyon where the Heavenly Mother River had once carved its way into the mortal plains stretched before the Lifeline Expedition like a wounded artery of the earth.
He stood at the edge of the sheer black glass cliff edge. Lin Xiao looked down into a deep gap that defied mortal understanding. A thousand feet wide and plunging over three thousand feet straight down into the smoldering dark, the canyon had once channeled an endless, roaring torrent of turquoise ice-slow water that nourished three mortal empires. Barges carrying silk, tea, and grain had navigated these depths for thirty dynasties, their songs echoing against the towering canyon cliffs.
Now, not a single drop of liquid water remained in the canyon.
The huge riverbed was an open, jagged trench of baked dark rock and glass-fused black glass, cracked into huge slabs as hard as forged iron. Huge river boulders that had once been polished smooth by millenia of rushing currents were now charred pitch-black, crusted with pale-yellow blooms of crystal-clear sulfur and red stone melted rock waste.
Along the floor and walls of the canyon, dozens of deep earth-shaking fissures vented plumes of white-hot fiery gas with violent, rhythmic shrieks that sounded like the shrieking whistles of a hundred runaway locomotives.
