The crimson roots pulsed like open veins through the stone belly of the capital.
Every subterranean conduit beneath the Inner Palace groaned under a torrent of boiling liquid cinnabar.
High above the rooftops, the nine Blood-Furnace Obelisks glowed with blinding scarlet light. The Vermilion God-Emperor had channeled the imperial dragon-vein directly into the obelisk pedestals.
With every beat of the dragon-vein, thick fleshy roots bored through sewer masonry and water mains.
They spread like fungal tendrils toward the civilian residential wards. The arrays were designed to siphon the blood and soul vitality of ten million chained citizens straight into the imperial sacrifice cauldrons.
In the southern wards, hundreds of thousands of civilians wailed behind barred cellar doors.
“The ground is heating up!” a blacksmith shouted, dragging his weeping children onto a wooden table. “The stones are bleeding! The wells are turning to hot copper!”
Two miles away in the Royal Tea Garden, Kaelen’s Star-Iron Cauldron sat quietly on the grass.
