The deep underground forge of the Myriad Spirit Safe hall was hollowed from the living heart of a dormant fiery chimney. Here, where rivers of molten dark rock sluggishly churned beneath heavy iron grates, heat was not a surrounding condition. It was a physical weight that pressed against the lungs and turned ordinary mortal flesh to blistered leather.
Tie Shan stood stripped to the waist before his central forging anvil. His seven-foot frame, thick with cords of dark iron-bear muscle and graying fur, was slick with running sweat that sizzled whenever a stray ember landed upon his skin.
Around the cavernous workshop, forty master smiths—burly bull-beast apprentices, veteran dwarven metal-shapers, and human weapon-masters—stood back in respectful, anxious silence. On a raised dark rock stone stand rested a heavy glass-shielded crucible containing a single, thumb-sized shard of black glass back shell retrieved from the crushed outer edge of the western ridge vanguard.
Even contained within enchanted quartz, the tiny fragment pulsed with a faint, oily gray shaking that made the surrounding air feel thin and rancid.
“They say magic fails against it,” Tie Shan rumbled, his voice scraping like grinding millstones against the fiery stone. His massive left arm, grafted by Lin Xiao from ancient golden titan bone-marrow and star-iron in their early days, bent until the golden runes beneath his fur flared with blinding amber light. “They say sword intent dissolves into mist. They say lightning and dragon flame are nothing more than sugar water to these cosmic ticks.”
