The chalk dust was thick enough to make Lin Ke’s cracked lips burn.
He knelt on the cold slate floor of the high command vault, a chunk of white limestone scraping against the stone with a rhythmic, screeching rasp.
Around him, thirty-six layout diagrams covered sixty square yards of dark stone slabs. Every diagram depicted an upright column of banded spirit-iron, interleaved with thick copper inductors and flanked by liquid-liquid silver shunting channels.
*
“The outer leylines are cut,” Zhao Wuji said. He leaned heavily on a cane of polished black wood. His wounded left shoulder was bound in tight silk. But his dark, calculating eyes were fixed on the chalk lines between Lin Ke’s knees. “Sovereign Yuan Ming has anchored twelve floating siege platforms along the northern ridge. They have driven jade stakes into the Earth Dragon’s back. No surrounding spiritual energy will enter this valley from the outside.”
“We don’t need surrounding energy from the valley,” Lin Ke said without looking up, his chalk snapping as he drew a series of nested circles around Pylon Twelve. “We’re pulling it from the ceiling.”
Elder Wu DeZheng stood at the edge of the slate floor. He lifted the hems of his stitched robes to keep them out of the chalk powder. He stared at the drawings as though they were demonic curses.
