The southern gateway to the Myriad Spirit Safe hall was a natural geographic bottleneck carved through thousands of years of rushing river water. Two upright granite bluffs, sheer as cut cliffs and rising three hundred feet into the blood-tinted night sky, narrowed until only eighty feet of open gorge remained between them.
Beyond this narrow throat lay the outer gravel flats and the rolling wastelands of the southern plains. Behind it lay the thriving, terraced paradise of the safe hall’s volcano bowl.
The earth beneath the gorge was already humming like a plucked bronze wire.
Ten miles to the south, the vanguard of the one hundred thousand demonic beasts was closing the distance at terrifying speed. The ground-shaking rattled loose shale from the cliff faces. It sent cascades of gray gravel skittering into the dark dry riverbed. The acrid odor of burning blood-oil, ozone, and sulfur drifted upon the cold wind, painting the night air with the metal tang of impending slaughter.
Marching down the stone road from the upper workshops came Tie Shan.
The seven-foot-tall Earth-Bear blacksmith loomed like an iron tower in the crimson moonlight. He had stripped off his leather apron, wearing only his polished star-iron shoulder pauldrons and said clearlyshin guards. His huge chest fur, bristling and dark gray, rose and fell with rhythmic, packed power. Resting across his broad right shoulder was his five-hundred-jin meteor-iron forging hammer. Its squared head glowed with dull ochre light.
His golden right arm, forged from ancient marrow and star-bronze, hummed with a deep, underground deep ring that made the bedrock beneath his boots vibrate in sympathetic harmony.
Behind him marched three hundred earth-bear warriors and artisans.
Each bear was clad in heavy star-iron plate. Their huge paws gripped box-shaped tower shields and heavy bronze crowbars. Four heavy wooden sledges, hauled by teams of burly bear apprentices, carried sixty massive slabs of cold-forged meteor-iron, each four inches thick and grooved with linked tongue-and-groove joints.
“Drop the anchor sledges!” Tie Shan barked, his voice booming off the granite bluffs like rolling thunder. “Form the foundation line! Eighty paces across, anchor to the living rock!”
The bear artisans swung into motion with practiced, timed together care. They unloaded the iron slabs. They cleared the surface gravel down to the solid, unbending solid mountain stone of the gorge floor.
Tie Shan walked to the exact center of the eighty-foot gap. He planted his heavy boots into the stone, his breath misting in the cold night air. He closed his eyes.
He didn’t channel demonic sacrifice or sky lightning. Instead, he channeled the ancient, patient power of the earth itself. The ancient memory of earth-shaking plates, deep magma veins, and the unbending weight of mountains that had stood since the dawn of the realm.
Golden veins of light flared along his star-bronze right arm, lighting up his grizzled beard with sky fire.
He raised his five-hundred-jin hammer high above his head with both paws.
“Earth-Marrow Deep hum: Mountain-Raising Stomp!” Tie Shan roared.
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
The meteor-iron hammer struck the bedrock with the bone-shaking force of an exploding meteor.
The blast wave didn’t shatter the rock into rubble. Guided by the Titan Smith’s deep earth-shaping intent, the moving deep ring plunged three hundred feet deep into the mountain’s roots.
CREEEEEEAAAK! RUUUUUUUMBLE!
An underground groan echoed through the gorge as the solid bedrock fractured along clean, sharp-angled fault lines. Before the eyes of the watching warriors, three massive slabs of living granite, each thirty feet tall and ten feet thick, surged upward from the earth like the rising teeth of a huge stone dragon!
The granite slabs locked into upright posture across the eighty-foot defile. It formed a seamless, thirty-foot-high castle wall that fully sealed the canyon throat.
“Hoist the iron cladding!” Tie Shan bellowed, wiping sweat from his brow with his golden forearm. “Slide the plates into the guide grooves!”
Two hundred bear warriors surged forward in pairs. Grunting with titanic strength, they hoisted the four-inch-thick meteor-iron slabs. It slid them vertically into the pre-carved granite channels lining the outer face of the wall.
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
Iron met granite with ear-splitting, metal impacts. Heavy bronze drop-pins, six inches in width, were driven through the linked seams with five-hundred-jin sledgehammers, pinning the iron plates directly to the mountain’s living spine.
Within forty-five minutes of back-breaking, heroic labor, the open canyon had vanished.
In its place stood an impregnable iron-hard metal earth-wall castle wall. Thirty feet of living granite fronted by four inches of star-forged meteor-iron, anchored so deeply into the canyon walls that to breach the gate would need tearing the entire mountain range from the earth.
Squelch. Boing. Flump.
A cheerful, rubbery sound approached along the newly raised low roof wall walkway.
Lin Xiao bounced up the stone steps, coming to a halt atop the central castle walls beside Tie Shan. The two-foot-wide sapphire slime gave a delighted wobble. He peeked down at the seamless metal face of the wall.
“My word, Tie Shan,” Lin Xiao marveled telepathically, his curved white eyes shining with admiration. “That’s not a gate, that’s a total masterpiece of civil defense! Look at those tongue-and-groove joints. They fit so tightly you couldn’t slide a sheet of paper between them!”
Tie Shan leaned heavily against his hammer handle, his broad chest heaving as he wiped a cascade of sweat from his forehead. A wide, proud grin split his iron-gray whiskers.
“Thank you, Sovereign,” Tie Shan rumbled, his voice thick with pride. “The meteor-iron Patriarch Lu brought us made all the difference. Dense, elastic, zero melted rock waste pockets. It can take a hundred tons of direct moving impact without buckling.”
Lin Xiao hopped onto the rim of the outer battlement, looking down the upright drop.
“It’s wonderfully sturdy, Tie Shan,” Lin Xiao observed thoughtfully. “However, when sixty thousand tons of charging beasts hit a fully rigid stone wall, physics dictates that the blast wave has to go somewhere. If the wall doesn’t yield at all, the moving backwash will travel into the granite roots. That created micro-fractures in the foundation. We need a proper shock-absorbing damper.”
“Ding.”
“Stretchy damping matrix calculated, Host,” the Dao Spirit chimed smoothly within Lin Xiao’s core. “Recommendation: Inject forty barrels of Primordial Chaos Damping Gel into the underground anchor seams and base footings. Moving fading away smooth speed will increase by eighty-eight point six percent.”
“Let’s give our wall some mid-air,” Lin Xiao chuckled.
Expanding several small nozzles along his lower outer rim, Lin Xiao extruded a thick stream of semi-clear, sapphire-colored fluid. The thick, sticky Primordial Chaos gel flowed down the face of the granite slabs like liquid glass, weeping into the foundation seams, expanding into the micro-fractures of the bedrock, and sealing the iron joints with a dense, rubbery buffer that removed all metal rattle.
Tie Shan struck the wall with his knuckles.
Instead of a harsh, jarring clang that sent shakes into the bone, the impact produced a deep, muffled thrum, like tapping a rubber mallet against a heavy leather drum.
The giant blacksmith’s eyes lit up with wonder. “The shaking... It’s fully swallowed! Sovereign, your blue jelly makes stone feel like hardened down!”
“It’s all about dampening the ringing tones, Tie Shan,” Lin Xiao said cheerfully. “A hard shield breaks. An elastic shield bounces.”
Suddenly, the cold wind blowing through the defile grew wildly gusty.
From the southern horizon, three miles away, the crimson dust cloud crested the outer ridge of the mountain pass. The twin blood-red moons cast long, jagged shadows across the gravel flats as the front wave of the demonic horde burst into view.
Five thousand swift shock-beasts—blood-panthers with barbed bone tails, two-headed gore-hounds foaming at the mouth, and armored razor-wolves—surged down the rocky slopes like a torrent of red fire. Their shrieks of man-made, parasite-driven madness echoed off the canyon cliffs, shrill and ear-splitting.
Riding high above the beasts upon floating platforms of woven bone, forty demonic handlers blew wild blasts on their cursed bone whistles. He pointed their jagged sickles toward the narrow defile.
“Sovereign!” Tie Shan growled, his hand tightening on his hammer as the bear warriors raised their tower shields along the low roof wall. “The swift vanguard is charging! They’ll reach the base of the wall in three minutes!”
Lin Xiao wobbled to the very edge of the battlement, looking down at the charging ocean of red eyes and snapping fangs. His curved crescent eyes showed no fear, no anger—only a calm, patient, and slightly playful determination.
“Tie Shan, tell the boys to keep their heads down and enjoy the show,” Lin Xiao said softly. “The mud water gates and the finger bone will handle the heavy boars later. But these poor, speedy little kitties and puppies? They need to learn that running headfirst into someone’s front door is very bad manners.”
Before Tie Shan could speak, Lin Xiao took a light hop into the empty air, plummeting thirty feet down into the dark mouth of the gorge with a cheerful, whistling wheeeee!