The gas didn’t smell like smoke. It smelled of boiled human liver and rotting pond scum.
It rolled across the narrow high walkways in a heavy, bubbling green wave, two hundred degrees hot, clinging to the iron railings like liquid grease. Where the vapor touched the clothing of an iron-puppet corpse, the hardened wool dissolved into smoking slime within three seconds.
Behind them, Zhao Wuji took a half-breath through his breathing mask and instantly doubled over, vomiting dark, bile-stained blood onto his boots. The skin-burning fine mist burned through his lung lining.
Apothecary He dragged the merchant backward, jamming a wad of bitter-salt sulfur-soaked cotton into Zhao Wuji’s nostrils while holding a linen mask over his own mouth.
“Don’t inhale!” He coughed hoarsely, tears of acid streaming down his wrinkled cheeks. “Corpse-Heart Smog! Packed living black rot! Inhale two lungfuls and your pleural tissue will turn into liquid grease before your knees hit the floor!”
Worse than the living threat was the hardware failure.
Across the twenty-five-square-mile chamber, the ten thousand dark rock giant pillars were beginning to scream.
The rotting smog was being pulled directly into the giant pillars’ intake cooling fans. The thick, sticky, boiling vapor was clogging the radiator fins, coating the heat-fading away plates with thick, insulative sludge.
