The underground air within the grand writing hall tightened until it felt brittle enough to snap.
Old Man Tie braced his massive boots against the dark rock flat stone slabs, his titan-bear muscles bulging beneath his iron-gray pelt as he locked the twenty-three-foot black glass guardian in place. The build continued to shudder with violent tremors, its internal gears screeching like dry iron dragged across broken slate. Puffs of foul, acrid black steam hissed from the seams of its neck collar. He carried the bitter stench of three hundred thousand years of unwashed decay.
“Hold him steady, Tie Shan!” Lin Xiao commanded, his tone calm and breezy as if he were asking a neighbor to hold a garden ladder. “Keep those chest vents angled toward the center aisle. You don’t want this splatter hitting the ancient jade scrolls on the lower shelves.”
“I’ve got him pinned, Lord Xiao!” Tie Shan grunted, his breath billowing in white clouds against the drafty cave air. “Though by the ancestors, this fellow’s shoulder pistons are fighting with the strength of four raging river mammoths! If you’re going to strike, strike true!”
Gu Qingfeng hovered five paces back, his hand glued to the handle of his flying sword. His green robes fluttered in the rough churning, and his sharp eyes narrowed as he watched Lin Xiao. In his three hundred years of martial wandering, the Sword Saint had seen grand formation masters employ grand solar arrays, heavenly thunder magic charms, and nine-turn soul-cleansing cooking pots…
