The golden wall loomed across the velvet darkness of the mesosphere like a continent of solid, burning sunlight suspended in zero gravity.
Da Peng closed the final three leagues at hypersonic speed. Then, the sheer scale of the Golden Cloud Barrier became suffocatingly clear. It wasn’t a wispy film of sky moisture. It was a dense, high-pressure mantle of tightly packed solar ether, fifty miles thick, crackling with linked nets of violet execution-lightning and razor-sharp spatial distortion glyphs that burned against the dark expanse of space.
Every square arm-length of the barrier had been engineered by the master builders of the Heavenly Tribulation Court to enforce the total quarantine of the mortal realm. For two million years, any bird that flew too high, any wandering spirit that drifted toward the stars, and any mortal fighter attempting secret ascension had struck this barrier and been instantly boiled away into core dust.
Behind Da Peng, the six assault skiffs held tight formation. Tie Shan stood braced against his saddle. His massive paws tested the tension on his harness, his meteor-iron knuckles white against the dark shaft of The Equalizer.
“Look at the thickness of that wall, Boss,” Tie Shan rumbled, squinting into the blinding glare. “That isn’t just gas. It’s solid energy tightly packed into a crystal-clear crust. The outer shell is running hotter than the core of my master forge!”
