The surrounding heat wave began eating the rock three hours after the envoy left.
It wasn’t heat, and it wasn’t acid.
It was high-hum crushing force bleeding from the active gateway. It shook at millions of cycles per second.
Lin Ke watched a hairline fracture crawl across the dark rock two inches from his left boot. The stone didn’t split with a crack. It dissolved into fine, grey flour that lifted into the empty pocket draft like powdered bone.
“The bedrock is losing thickness,” Meng Shan rumbled, his thick palms pressed flat against the rock face. “The anchor pins are loosening. Another twelve hours, and this shelf shears off into the lower cloud bank.”
“We aren’t leaving this shelf,” Lin Ke said.
He was kneeling in the center of the outcrop. He was surrounded by coils of refined silver wire, jagged chunks of native copper ore, and six polished slate tablets salvaged from Canglan’s deepest mine shafts.
His bare fingers were already black with soot and scored by thin, weeping copper cuts.
