The heat in the lower fire trench was hot enough to melt lead.
In the center of Foundry Nine, suspended above a deep pit of churning magma, hung Crucible Prime. It was a monstrous vessel. Forty feet across, cast from three hundred tons of heavy, bell-grade bronze and lined with black dark rock tile. Inside swirled sixty thousand gallons of raw Heavenly Sky-trial star-fire. It glowed with a blinding, violet-white glare that lit up every rivet in the ceiling.
Along the southern side of the bronze hull, an eight-foot hairline crack had opened like a bleeding wound.
A thin, shrieking jet of violet fire roared from the fissure, cutting through a nearby iron pillar like a hot wire through butter. The pillar collapsed with a groaning crash, splashing molten iron across the stone floor.
Standing on a narrow high walkway three feet from the breach was Artificer Bao Hong.
He was barely four and a half feet tall, built like an iron anvil with arms thicker than Lin Ke’s thighs, his bare torso coated in soot, oil, and old fire scars. He held a sixty-pound sledgehammer in one calloused hand and a slab of cold-forged bronze patching plate in the other, his bearded face soaked in greasy sweat.
