The wind screaming out of the Iron Rift smelled of sulfur, crushed shale, and high-voltage spark arcing.
Lin Ke stood at the cliff edge of the deep pit, his boots planted two inches from the ragged edge of a sheer three-thousand-foot drop. The deep gap stretched east to west for fifty leagues across the barren plateau, a total scar torn through the earth’s crust by precursor machinery ten thousand years ago.
Below them, swirling plumes of violet spiritual foul fog rolled through the depths like boiling clouds of amethyst oil.
Every four breaths, an uneven discharge of blue lightning tore through the smog, lighting up jagged dark rock crags that jutted from the canyon walls like the ribs of a buried giant statue. The magnetic tension in the air was so intense that the hair on Lin Ke’s arms stood straight out. The fine iron filings clinging to Meng Shan’s armor buzzed like a hive of hornets.
“Look at the sheer scale of the waste,” Lin Ke said, his voice quiet against the gale.
Five hundred paces to their left, perched on the canyon rim like a giant steel spider, was Zhao Wuji’s main extraction rig.
It was a monstrosity of heavy-duty carpentry and crude steam hydraulics. Four towering overhead frame cranes built of hardwood and bolted bronze plates hung over the void, lowering massive cargo hoists into the deep gap.
