The dark rock stele tasted of sulfur, cold stone, and dead men’s sweat.
Lin Ke stood three paces from its base, the midnight draft from the melted rock waste gorges whistling through the rips in his grey hemp tunic. The wind carried the metal reek of Furnace Four’s dying embers. But around the monument itself, the air remained fully, unnaturally stale.
A faint grey haze clung to the carvings.
In the courtyard of the Seventh Ward, the ten-foot slab looked less like a sacred storehouse of old family wisdom and more like a tombstone sunk into a bed of crushed coke. For three hundred years, every boy and girl bought from the border famines had knelt before this rock. She pressed their foreheads into the sharp gravel until their brows bled, chanting the seventy-two couplets until their breath ran white in winter.
They thought the stiffness in their fingers was spiritual weight. They thought their aching spines were the foundation of immortality.
Lin Ke reached into his sleeve, fingering the worn iron metal pen.
His Vitreous Glass Spirit veins twitched beneath the skin of his wrists. Even from three paces away, the surrounding spiritual field leaking from the stele’s boundary runes exerted a gentle, insidious drag on his breath flow. A high-hum pull tuned exactly to the iron in human hemoglobin.
