The fall ended in boiling grease and spark-charged copper.
Lin Ke hit the dressed bronze plating of Pier 12 shoulder-first, instantly rolling beneath the lower narrow high walkway as the Imperial Patrol Cruiser’s blinding amber searchlight swept over the docking bay. Venting white-hot Qi through his palm channels, he cast a nearby heat shroud across his companions, matching their external heat signed name to the boiling sulfur chimney pipes below so the warship’s sensors swept blind across the boat ramp.
Beside him, Meng Shan landed on both feet with a low grunt, the soles of his boots gouging two steaming furrows into the metal decking. High-flow pushback earth channels within the big man’s shins hummed, shunting forty tons of falling moving driving force straight into the pier’s load-bearing wooden support posts.
“Keep your heads down,” Lin Ke spat through his teeth.
The air tasted like burnt hair and sour copper vinegar. A low, rhythmic thrum shook through the floor plates. The clockwork heartbeat of a heavy-duty complex so vast that its cooling chimney pipes pierced the clouds of the Lower Ninth Heaven.
Behind them, Wu DeZheng tumbled onto his knees, wildly clutching a water-damaged wooden chest of archival tax rolls to his chest. Apothecary He stumbled out of the thinning spatial tear, coughing up bitter yellow bile onto the scorched bronze deck. Zhao Wuji was pulled through the backup data pipe in the final packet burst just before the sky-slit collapsed, tumbling onto the bronze deck alongside Shen Yue in…
