The words did not echo as a battle-cry. They swelled through the dense, glassy medium with the deep, quiet deep ring of an ancient temple bell struck at the third hour of dawn.
Because the sunrise is worth the night.
The simple phrase, born from sixty seasons of salt-weathered survival, struck the spectral leaden face of Zhu Heling with the physical impact of a falling mountain. The liquid iron pool beneath the beast’s maw shivered wildly, its dark surface wrinkling with nested rings of golden sound blast waves that radiated outward across the grey silt floor.
“Worth the night?” Zhu Heling’s voice shrieked, the leaden face twisting in agony as the concept burned into his frozen logic like white-hot iron. “A momentary flicker of red light across a dead sea? You would endure ten thousand leagues of drowning, forty hundred years of bone-grinding pressure, and the screams of nine slaughtered heavens... Just to see a red ball rise over the mud? That is madness! That is the pathetic self-delusion of a beast that can’t bear the truth of its own slaughterhouse!”
“It is not delusion,” Qiao Ming answered, taking another slow, heavy pace forward. His bare coral-jade soles left glowing footprints of emerald warmth upon the glass-fused flat stone slabs, each stride melting the black void-rime across three arm-lengths of rock. “It is the only truth that has ever mattered. A stone does not know dawn. An iron dredge does not know warmth. You sacrificed your soul to the void-iron…
