The soot was still there, but the smell of burnt blood was gone.
Lin Ke stood in the central bay of the Seventh Smelting Ward, his hand resting on the rusted iron lever of Crucible No. 9.
The dark rock floor beneath his cloth shoes was scarred and pitted, bearing the faded gouges where Overseer Fang’s copper whip had bitten into the stone twenty years ago. The fire brick was cool to the touch, resting after hundreds of years of non-stop infernal roasting.
His physical body carried the indelible marks of the journey:
White razor-sharp scars along both collarbones where Apothecary He had wired the shattered bones back together, heat striations running down his forearms like stone-hard lightning. A permanently calloused left thumb pad etched with hundreds of micro-punctures from his iron metal pen.
His Vitreous Glass Spirit veins no longer hummed with screaming, unstable data spikes.
They were cool, calm, and diamond-clear, conducting the surrounding spiritual Qi of the world with the easy, silent smooth-flowing flow of a deep mountain river.
Beside him, Meng Shan had rolled up his sleeves, his massive arms glistening with honest sweat as he shoveled thirty years of hardened coal clinkers out of the lower ash pit.
