The air in Sub-Vault Four tasted of wet lime and dead iron.
Six hundred feet below the mountain’s granite roots, moisture dripped steadily from stalactites that had taken four hundred years to grow around ancient copper channel pipes. The floor was covered in hardened sludge, slick under the thick leather soles of Meng Shan’s boots.
Meng Shan walked half a pace ahead, his eight-thousand-pound black iron shield held level at his shoulder.
His broad, blunt face was carved from the same stubborn rock as the mountain, unreadable and still. Every two steps, the iron base of his shield dragged lightly along the stone floor, acting as a moving probe against trip-plates.
“Trap wards ahead,” Meng Shan rumbled, his voice like boulders shifting in a riverbed. “Ancient. Copper-cored.”
Lin Ke nodded, lifting his iron metal pen. “Bypass the pressure triggers. Follow the channel seam along the left rib.”
They navigated the cave until the hall opened into a vast fallout vault from the Primordial Era. Broken jade slips lay piled in sedimentary layers along the outer edge, crushed to fine talc by long-forgotten cave-ins.
In the center of the chamber, resting on a stone stand of rusted through bronze melted rock waste, stood a jagged stele of fractured black glass.
