The heavy oak doors of Crucible One splintered inward with an ear-splitting boom.
Auditor Bao Ling strode into the foundry, his soot-stained silk robes billowing behind him. It was flanked by six court guards wielding double-handed sledgehammers and magnetic iron chains. In his left hand, Bao carried an open ledger bound in blackened sharkskin—the Imperial Ancestral Quarry Registry.
“Tally the dead!” Bao snapped, waving a brass-capped metal pen at the students huddled along the outer edge walls. “Seventy head of hardened mining cattle. Under royal asset forfeiture statutes, all stone-hardened living leftovers belong to the Board of Heavenly Works.”
Bao marched straight toward the smelting pit, his eyes scanning the floor for Meng Shan’s stone-hard corpse.
Instead, he found Meng Shan standing on the iron grating.
The giant was bare-chested, six feet eight inches of dark rock-glazed muscle streaming the dry, crushing heat of a cooled kiln. He stood with his arms crossed over his massive chest. He looked down at the clerk with the quiet stillness of a cliff face.
Bao Ling froze. His pencil hovered above the sharkskin page.
“You...” Bao stammered, his small eyes bulging. “You’re standing. The Melted rock-Vein bell tolled three times. Your heart should be a lump of hardened shale!”
