Down on the lower slopes of Mount Cangxuan, inside the huge cavernous forge shop of the Myriad Spirit Safe hall, the heat of underground magma competed with the wild energy of hundreds of master blacksmiths.
Just hours earlier, Old Man Tie had stood by his central anvil in crushing despair. The one-armed titan bear smith, who had reforged old family relics and shaped divine meteor-iron with his bare paws, had watched a tiny fragment of void dust dissolve his finest iron-hard metal blade into featureless gray static. He had believed the end of all craftsmanship had arrived. That the cosmos was being erased by an unbending cold that no forge fire could ever warm.
Now, Tie Shan was glued to the eyepiece of an eight-foot brass sky telescope mounted to the cliffside balcony.
Beside the great brass telescope, dozens of wide bronze basins filled with enchanted spring water served as public scrying mirrors. Projected upon the shimmering water was the real-time panoramic view of the stratosphere eighty thousand paces above.
In the glow, the citizens of the safe hall could clearly see the fifty-mile-wide glowing blue sphere bouncing merrily along the cirrus clouds, twirling fifty-league chopsticks to pluck three-mile black glass dreadnoughts out of the sky like soup dumplings.
