The rain that fell at dawn didn’t taste like water.
It was warm, thick, sticky. Then it left a faint yellow ring on Lin Ke’s stone tea table that fizzed like weak strong etching acid. When he touched a drop with his fingertip, the skin tingled with nearby static-electric charge.
High above the Azure Cloud ridges, the sky remained a bruised, gangrenous purple.
The color was not cloud cover. It was sky ionization. Unshielded high-voltage channels running through the upper troposphere were stripping electrons from the cold air and oxygen molecules, bleeding massive power loads of waste heat wave into the biosphere.
Lin Ke stood upon the highest crest of Eagle Peak. He held a three-foot bronze yardstick tipped with a ground lead wire.
Beside him, Shen Yue steadied a heavy wooden tripod holding five air-pressure liquid silver columns.
“Readings on column three,” Lin Ke called out against the whistling wind.
Shen Yue squinted through her bronze goggles, shielding her eyes from the violet glare above. “Liquid silver level dropped another two inches! The sky moisture index is forty percent below historic records for the third month of spring. The air is acting like dry sponge.”
