The evening breeze drifting across the newly paved northern highway carried the sweet aroma of wild mountain sage, roasting garlic, and crackling campfires.
Where a bottomless deep-sea deep gap had threatened to eat the mortal plane barely four hours earlier, a clean sixty-foot-wide granite boulevard now stretched from horizon to horizon. Along its edges, one hundred and eight heavy load-bearing steel pillars rose toward the twilight, connected by the faintly shimmering golden lines of the high-sky solar Faraday grid humming serenely in the upper air.
In the shadows of the baggage wagons three miles back, Regional Envoy Wu was currently attempting to crawl on his hands and knees beneath a canvas tarpaulin.
“Quietly! Move quietly, you fools!” Wu hissed, his voice muffled by the mud on his collar as he glared at his four trembling palanquin bearers. “If that monster in blue denim remembers I threatened to execute him for insubordination, he will drive an eighty-foot steel nail through my spine and cite me for an uninspected building permit! Load my gold chests! We’re slipping away through the western gorge before the army realizes I’m gone!”
Before the bearers could lift the palanquin poles, a heavy shadow fell across the carriage. Commander Zhao, with two dozen armored captains with bare swords, stood blocking the trail, his face like carved iron.
