The heat was an invisible wall that fell from the clouds like a physical ceiling.
Within ten minutes of Yuan Ming’s magic chant, the surrounding heat in the valley climbed from forty degrees to seventy-five, then to ninety, then past one hundred and ten.
On the pine-covered ridges flanking Seven Star Pass, dry needles began to smoke without a spark.
A moment later, ten square miles of ancient spruce forests erupted into spontaneous, roaring sheets of orange fire.
Down in the rocky gorge, the shallow waters of the Iron River began to bubble and churn, venting clouds of rotten-egg steam as river trout floated to the surface, boiled white in their scales.
*
Lin Ke looked straight up into the high sky.
High in the stratosphere, beyond the height where clouds could form, nine blazing bright spheres of blinding white-gold solar fire had materialized in an even sky-high ring.
