If there was one sound that could rival the roar of thunder across the eastern ridges of the Floating Mountain, it was the booming, uninhibited belly laugh of Old Man Tie.
“Hahahahaha! Clear the staging yard, you whelps!” the Divine Titan Smith bellowed, his voice shaking so forcefully through the stone courtyard that several loose terracotta roof tiles rattled along the roof edges. “Bring up the spiced oil barrels! Crack the seal on the underground fire-vent! Today we feed three realms, and by the ancestors, not a single stomach leaves this peak half-full!”
Standing in the center of the vast culinary terrace, Tie Shan cut an awe-inspiring figure. Towering seven feet tall, the bear beastman elder was built like a walking granite battlement, his thick iron-gray fur bristling with life-force. His left arm was wrapped in heavy leather aprons studded with brass rivets. At the same time, his right arm—reforged years ago by Lin Xiao from star-iron ore and living sky bone-marrow—gleamed with a deep, liquid-golden luster in the morning light.
Before him, anchored into deep stone sockets carved directly into the mountain’s bedrock, sat three massive cooking vessels.
They weren’t ordinary iron cooking pots. Cast from high-purity sky bronze alloyed with heat-conducting fiery quartz, each wok measured nine deep-water lengths—over fifty-four feet—in width. Their curving bronze walls were thick as castle gates, polished to a mirror sheen that reflected the billowing white clouds drifting past the cliff edge.
