The brass narrow high walkway trembled beneath Lin Ke’s boots like an over-stressed violin string.
Every inch of the underground cave smelled of ozone, stone oil. The dry, sweet scent of hyper-tightly packed life-force. Thirty feet to their left, the emerald torrent inside the main crystal-clear channel screamed with the moving fury of an underground ocean being forced through a needle’s eye.
Five hundred paces ahead, Array Master Qi Heng paused his check.
The silver-robed engineer frowned at the crystal compass in his palm. He tapped its brass casing with an irritable flick of his thumb, then looked up at the golden-armored judge captain standing beside him.
“The deep ring in this junction is drifting by three hundred millihertz,” Qi Heng snapped. His voice carried clearly over the roar through a sound amplification collar. “Mortal vermin above must be running secret smelting operations. Captain, cycle the wide-band sweeping ward. Clean the outer edge.”
“At once, Master Qi,” the captain replied.
The captain stepped forward, raised his four-pronged axe-spear. Then he drove its butt into the brass platform.
A high, crystal-clear chime chimed through the cave. From the tip of the weapon, a blinding golden sweep-wave swelled outward in a perfect three-hundred-and-sixty-degree hemisphere.
