The air didn’t burn. It vanished.
The twenty-pace sphere of pitch-black Yang fire fell through the three-thousand-foot mark. Then, the air pressure above Seven Star Pass plummeted by sixty percent in four seconds.
A howling, inward-rushing empty pocket gale tore across the castle walls. It snapped heavy hardwood flagpole stays like dry twigs and dragged loose roof tiles, gravel, and unanchored wooden carts toward the center of the impact zone.
At the edge of the low roof wall, a young outer student lost his footing. Before he could scream, the sheer air-pressure suction dragged him twelve feet across the stone toward the falling black sphere.
*
Meng Shan caught the boy by the ankle with a single hand, hauling him back behind a stone support prop and pinning him to the floorboards.
Lin Ke didn’t move.
He stood atop the central pylon platform, his bare feet braced against the copper cap, his clothes whipping wildly in the violent sky vortex.
