Zhu Heling had entered the final, wild circle of his madness.
He stood upon the trembling iron deck of the Grand Borer as the twelve-ton war-engine battered its way through the outer gates of Entry hall 544. His clothes were shredded, his iron skullcap cracked down the center, and his right eye burned with a wild, feverish light that seemed to eat the flesh of his face. Around his neck, the copper tubes that fed the stolen dao-cores into his spirit veins were hissing wildly, venting purple, ozone-laden steam that smelled of scorched flesh and roasted marrow.
Before him knelt Captain Zhao, the battered survivor of the mosaic floor disaster, his hands covered in wet black silt, his armor dented and stripped of its plates.
“They are gone, my lord,” Zhao cried, his voice cracking with sheer hysteria. “The sledges... The forty-eight chests... The oxen... Everything went into the sludge canal. The floor tilted under our feet! The land-mapper... He broke the rocker-pins with a single blow of his plumb!”
Zhu Heling did not draw his golden needle this time.
He simply stared down at the trembling officer, his chest heaving with rapid, shallow gasps as his heart-muscle struggled against the hardening poison of the cores. A slow, terrifying grin stretched across his blackened lips. A smile so empty of humanity that it chilled the blood of every man who looked upon it.
