Pei Xuan set down his bowl of hot soy milk on the stone table and gestured for Abacus Su and Mo Xiaoliu to spread the ancient star-metal scroll across the marble tabletop.
Hearing the urgency in Abacus Su’s voice, Old Wei, General Tie Zhan, Hong Ling, and Ye Guhan quickly gathered around the courtyard table. Down inside the central well, Ao Ming pushed his massive horned dragon head up another ten feet, squinting his lantern-sized golden eyes at the strange metallic parchment.
Unlike ordinary silk or bamboo scrolls of the Central Continent, this scroll was woven from dark-purple meteoric wire that neither fire nor water could damage. Across its surface, thousands of tiny crimson runes formed a three-dimensional holographic cross-section of the entire world—Planet Canglan—pairing directly with the golden beast-skin surface map they had seized from Ancestor Blood-Sword!
“My Lord, Treasurer Hong Ling found this lead-sealed star-metal box buried under three layers of false bottoms inside Ancestor Heaven-Lock’s ancestral ring,” Abacus Su explained rapidly, pushing his spectacles up his nose. “Even Ancestor Heaven-Lock himself didn’t know what was inside—he said their sect’s founding patriarch a thousand years ago left a blood-curse warning that no descendant below Rank 7 Nascent Soul was ever allowed to open it. Once we matched it with the beast-skin map from Blood-Sword’s ring, Minister Xiaoliu and I used your fused [Hydraulic Can-Opener Array] to pop the lid off five minutes ago!”
