The air in the Lower Heavens tasted of sulfuric acid, burnt machine oil, and crushed jade.
It wasn’t the fragrant, sky paradise promised in mortal myth.
It was a sprawling, dystopian heavy-duty heartland. A multi-tiered world-size processing end-post where the raw, stolen spiritual wealth of five hundred conquered lower worlds was hauled, refined, and burned to keep the Jade Capital from freezing in the cosmic dark.
Lin Ke stood at the outer edge railing of the docking slip.
Below him, through breaks in the thick, yellow-green smog, stretched an endless expanse of spirit-coal furnaces the size of mountain ranges.
Huge copper cooling towers vented screaming columns of white-hot Yang steam into the upper strata.
Thousands of self-running iron cargo barges moved along glowing golden leyline channels, their bellies laden with crates of lower-realm soul-tithes, guided by exhausted junior immortals wielding glowing tally-rods.
Above the docking slips, massive bronze loudspeakers suspended from iron chains blared emergency announcements in cold, blended court dialect:
