The northern horizon had become a howling cosmic storm of bruised purple lightning and shrieking void-winds.
With the Heaven-Locking Barrier shattered across four hundred miles, sky drag was the only thing preventing the Jiuzhou Plane from losing its breathable air to the cosmic empty pocket. Spatial hurricanes, whipping across the borderlands at two hundred miles per hour, tore hundreds of years-old stone watchtowers from their foundations and launched them into the clouds like pebbles. Through the ragged tears in the stratosphere, winged void hunting beasts—giant beasts with multi-jointed barbed wings and needle-beaks of hardened spatial crystal—swarmed through the breach, dive-bombing the fleeing mortal legions.
Yet in the center of the chaotic, trembling plain, Frank stood holding a bundle of red wooden land-mapper stakes, squinting through the eyepiece of his brass builder’s transit level.
“Map point forty-two has a three-minute compass bearing error,” Frank remarked calmly, adjusting the leveling screws on the brass tripod. “Niu Mang, move the red flag sixteen inches to the east. We need true solar grid posture if the six-sided lattice is going to balance.”
Niu Mang jogged through the gale, his hard dark metal trench shovel slung over his broad shoulder. He yanked the red stake from the dirt, stepped exactly sixteen inches east. Then he drove it home with a single stomp of his steel-toed boot. “Flag forty-two lined up, Foreman!” Niu Mang yelled over the shrieking wind.
