The sound didn’t come through the air. It came through the bedrock.
It arrived as a nauseating, sub-heard shaking that turned Lin Ke’s stomach into a knot of cold grease. Then he made his glassy glass spirit veins hum like struck tuning forks.
A fine dusting of lime powdered his hair from the ceiling of the Western Bastion’s descent tunnel.
Fifty feet below ground, inside the Underground Ward Vault, three apprentice array-smiths were already on their knees. It grabbed their ears as thin trickles of dark blood seeped past their fingers.
*
In the center of the chamber stood the sect’s pride: the Great Basalt Core.
It was an unbroken monolith of polished black jade and tightly packed dark rock, nine feet thick and thirty feet tall, quarried during the founding dynasty eight hundred years ago. Fine, detailed golden runes covered its surface in a nonstop, flowing script, binding thirty miles of curtain wall into a single unbroken energetic loop.
Right now, that unbroken loop was about to kill everyone inside the pass.
