The soles of Lin Ke’s boots were melting.
The smell of scorched rubber, charred pig-grease, and boiling pitch filled the air. The black meteorite floor turned from cherry-red to a blinding, blazing bright orange. Ten thousand feet beneath them, the land-wide bus was vomiting unthrottled Yang-Earth fire into Node 07’s main intake pipe hub, surging at forty times the work-yard’s rated working load.
Bubbles of liquid stone, the size of carriage wheels, rose from the floor seams and burst with wet, gaseous pops that sprayed molten dark rock against the crystal-clear giant pillars.
High above, the vaulted ceiling began to crack. Slabs of shale the size of hay wagons snapped away from the mountain roots, vaporizing into fiery dust before they even touched the boiling floor.
“We have forty seconds!” Shen Yue screamed, holding her arms up against the blinding heat wave that seared her eyebrows.
Her silk robes were already singed brown, smoking in the heat-rising gale that tore through the machine room. “Brother Lin! The cooling arrays can’t vent this much fire! The entire mountain is turning into a volcano bowl!”
In the far corner of the room, Zhao Wuji was sobbing on his knees, his face blistered by the heat, his fine dragon-silk robes catching fire along the hem. “Let me out! Open the portal! The whole province is going to melt! My guild will pay fifty million stones! Just open the door!”
