The outer curtain wall of the Nine-Dragon Conferred Megacity didn’t look like an office boundary. It looked like an unpermitted deep-rock intrusion.
Three hundred feet of polished dark rock rose into the midday haze, heavy at five-pace intervals by iron-hard metal stone props. Above the castle walls, nine golden dragon statues coiled around spiraling stone spires, venting spark-charged spiritual mist that formed a rainbow-bright dome over eight hundred square miles of royal territory.
At the base of this monstrous barrier sat the South Dragon Gate.
A hundred and twenty feet of heavy black iron hung suspended within a massive stone archway, counterweighted by iron chains as thick as old-growth redwood trunks. The chains ran into cavernous overhead machicolations, looped through sixty-foot bronze pulley wheels. Then it vanished into the gate towers.
Every time the drop-gate rose, the entire district shuddered.
SKRRRRRR-CLANK-SCREEEEEECH!
It wasn’t the roar of a royal stronghold. It was the painful, metal-on-metal scream of a dry bronze sleeve bearing eating itself alive under a five-hundred-ton outward load.
Lu Zhen stood fifty paces from the entry line, his yellow spun-glass hard hat tilted back on his forehead, his left eyelid twitching with irritation.
