The smell of perfumed sandalwood was entirely out of place in the melted rock waste gorge.
It drifted on the cold mountain wind, mingling sickeningly with the sour reek of sulfur and cooling iron. Twenty paces outside the Seventh Ward’s front wooden wall, the rocky road had been blocked by four heavy pine barricades, each staked with the blue-and-gold banners of the Azure Cloud Sect’s Grand Logistics Board.
In the center of the road sat Zhao Wuji.
He didn’t sit on the gravel. A carved blackwood armchair had been placed on a raised carpet of crimson wool. Zhao was nineteen years old, dressed in flowing robes of azure silk stitched with golden coin-patterns along the wide sleeves. A jade coronet bound his oiled hair. Across his knees rested a massive, wide-bladed broadsword wrapped in a sword sheath of black lacquered horn: the Seven Law Judicator.
Flanking him were four Foundation Establishment guards in full bronze breastplates, their spiritual pressure streaming outward like a heavy, humid fog that pressed down on the chests of the surrounding fire slaves.
Around the three heavy timber wagons carrying Lin Ke’s cobalt spirit steel, Zhao’s men had already hammered seven copper boundary spikes into the earth.
