The silence that followed Lin Tao’s declaration was broken only by the wild, high-pitched whistling of steam escaping from the relief valve on the star-copper metal tube.
Elder Qian stared at the seventeen-year-old youth with an expression that shifted rapidly from shock to utter, unhinged disbelief. For two hundred years, no student—not even an Inner Court deacon—had ever spoken to a Core Formation elder with such calm, disrespectful insolence.
“A mortal land-mapper?” Qian hissed, his lips curling back over yellowed teeth. His seven-ringed brass staff began to spin above his palm, the brass rings clashing against one another with a chaotic, screeching deep ring of seventy-two cycles per second. “A slave from the melted rock waste pits waves a scrap of outer court bronze and presumes to lecture me on water rights?”
The eight apprentices drew their serrated flensing knives. Their eyes shone through the glass viewports of their respirators.
“Kill them,” Qian commanded, his voice dripping with poisonous casualness. “Toss their bodies into the melted rock waste drainage trench. The Trial will assume they slipped into the boiling channels while chasing phantom leaks.”
The two foremost apprentices lunged forward, their blades coated in a shimmering layer of acid-burning green qi designed to melt human flesh down to the marrow.
