The sound of royal bronze being melted down in Tie Shan’s fiery forge was like the deep, rhythmic song of a dragon returning to the sea.
In the cavernous lower smelting chambers of the Floating Mountain, the massive earth-heat chimney pipes roared with blinding crimson heat. Using fifty-ton overhead timber cranes, teams of bear beastfolk and mortal ironworkers lowered the shattered leftovers of the Upper Realm’s twelve solar execution pylons into the great crucible.
The gold-plated sky alloys, which for ten thousand years had channeled lethal payback lightning to murder rising fighters, dissolved into glowing, liquid honey.
Tie Shan stood upon the raised narrow high walkway. His meteor-iron right arm glowed dull cherry-red as he operated the high-pressure tilting levers.
He wasn’t casting weapons of war. The molten sky bronze was being poured into massive sand molds shaped as ringing temple bells, heavy irrigation water gate collars, and thousands of sturdy plowshares distributed freely to every farming cooperative from the southern deltas to the northern plains.
“Ten thousand years of executioners’ spears,” Tie Shan laughed boisterously, wiping a soot streak from his temple, “and they make the finest cabbage-chopping cleavers this side of the cosmos!”
High above, in the mountainous frontier of the Qingyun Sword Sect two thousand miles to the north, a young fighter was preparing for the most terrifying moment of his life.
