The air in Sub-Vault Zero was three hundred years stale.
It tasted of yellow sulfur crust, wet rust, and the choking heaviness of underground carbon dioxide pooling in the deep dark rock drain pits. Every breath burned the back of the throat like inhaling powdered burning lime powder.
Lin Ke crouched on a rusted iron narrow high walkway suspended eighty feet above an inactive fiery fissure beneath the Seventh Ward. His miner’s lantern cast twitching shadows across walls of giant stone granite blocks, carved with sharp-angled glyphs that predated the Azure Cloud Sect by thousands of years.
Behind him, Meng Shan squeezed through a narrow breach in the ancient stonework. His massive was dark rock-glazed shoulders scraping orange sparks from the jagged stone.
“Two hours until dawn,” Meng Shan rumbled. He wiped green cave slime from his brow with a greasy forearm. “The fake ramming outside has stopped. Zhao Wuji has run out of excuses to delay his charge.”
“The royal tribunals don’t accept memory slips or secondhand hearsay,” Lin Ke said, checking the draft torch for oxygen depletion. “Imperial Censors only bow to approved physical artifacts—rubbings taken directly from ancient, unchanging stone steles.”
Shen Yue crawled through the breach after Meng Shan, coughing into her sleeve as she protected a bundle of coarse mulberry paper and a sealed jar of lampblack ink.
