Dawn broke over the Red-Sand Wastes, and the scene around Dry-Well Metropolis looked like the biggest construction site in the history of the universe.
Half a mile up in the sky, the Floating Jade Cloud Island drifted serenely, its thirty-five original mud huts glowing in the morning sun while waterfalls of Sweet-Spring mist rained down over the city. Directly below the floating island yawned the newly carved, five-mile-wide vertical launch chimney.
From the bottom of that fifty-mile-deep pit, a dull red glow pulsed rhythmically, accompanied by the muffled booming of the Upper-Realm Nail’s countdown clock:
“TIME REMAINING: EIGHT DAYS, TWENTY-TWO HOURS, ZERO MINUTES!”
Around the rim of the five-mile pit, all of Pei Xuan’s top commanders had gathered around a fifty-foot sand table.
White-Tiger Warlord Hu Ba—still wearing his crisp Chief Bus Dispatcher peaked cap over his fuzzy tiger ears—leaned over the sand table and scratched his chin with a claw.
“Lord Pei, I brought my two million Iron-Rhinos and Saber-Wolves up the Southern Highway overnight,” Hu Ba rumbled, pointing at the abyss. “They’re all fed and brushed, and their hooves are itching to pull something heavy. But how are we supposed to hitch our ropes to a pillar fifty miles underground? Regular hemp ropes will burn into ash before they even get ten miles down!”
