The midnight fog smelled of wet slate and crushed pine needles.
Lin Ke stood at the rim of the sunken quarry pit, two miles behind the roaring chimneys of Smelting Ward Seven. Beneath his boots, the ground fell away sixty paces into the black throat of the Black Crag Basin. An abandoned dark rock digging abandoned seventy years ago. Just then, the sect’s miners struck unbending, iron-dense bedrock.
A standard training cave was out of the question.
In his mental stress simulations, triggering an eight-hundred-degree heat settling inside an enclosed cave produced instant excess pressure. The expanding air blew up the cave roof within forty seconds, burying the fighter under eighty tons of collapsing limestone.
He needed a high-volume, open-air holding vessel with natural magnetic grounding.
“Solid dark rock all the way down,” a low, gravelly voice rumbled in the mist behind him.
Meng Shan stepped up to the rim. The broad-shouldered youth was carrying two forged spirit-iron grounding pylons on each shoulder. Four massive eight-sided bars of black iron, each five paces long and weighing four hundred pounds apiece. His corded neck veins pulsed dark and steady. His feet left two-inch depressions in the damp clay.
“Bedrock doesn’t shift,” Meng Shan grunted. He lowered the pylons to the gravel with a muted, metal clatter. “Good anchor. Takes a hit without groaning.”
