The chunk of green glass felt colder than river ice.
It had arrived clamped in the talons of a royal gyrfalcon that circled three times above Azure Cloud’s terrace before dropping its cargo and vanishing back into the clouds. Tied to the rock was a strip of silk inscribed with five characters in Chu Rong’s sharp, arrogant hand:
Sign, or become glass.
Lin Ke turned the fragment over in his bandaged palm.
The stone was perfectly glass-fused. Granite didn’t melt like this from ordinary fire. It needed millions of degrees of focused magnetic heat applied over a fraction of a split second.
“I’m going north,” Lin Ke said, slipping the glass into his leather pouch.
“Lin Ke, that’s four thousand miles into the Scorched Sun border,” Apothecary He snapped, adjusting the herbal splints around Lin Ke’s blistered forearms with aggressive tightness. “You have second-degree burns across both forearms, tiny blood vessel hemorrhages in your lung lining, and Chu Rong’s patrols are crawling over every highway!”
“If I don’t see the crater, I can’t calculate the weapon’s focal radius,” Lin Ke replied flatly. “You can’t defend against an artillery strike if you don’t know the caliber.”
