Sector Nine was not a mine drift. It was the rotting plumbing basement of a dying world.
Half a mile beneath the surface of the mountain, the surrounding heat rose from the freezing draft of the quarry to an oppressive, choking sixty degrees. Steaming stone water cascaded down the jagged dark rock walls in nonstop sheets. It pooled in knee-deep gutters that smelled of rotten eggs, scorched copper, and rancid thick tar.
Lin Tao and Tie Shan stood at the entrance of Drift 9-B, their ragged burlap smocks soaked through with sweat within five minutes of stepping off the iron elevator cage.
The air was so thick with moisture that drawing a breath felt like inhaling hot soup. Water drops dripped continuously from Lin Tao’s eyebrows, stinging his bloodshot eyes as he squinted through the sulfur steam.
The drift was seven feet wide, shored with massive timbers of stone-hard hardwood that groaned continuously under the earth-shaking weight of two thousand feet of solid rock. Every sixty seconds, a deep, low, deep shudder shook through the floor—the rhythmic pulse of the ancient Precursor earth-shaking stabilizers struggling to maintain world-size balance against the shifting mantle.
Tie Shan planted his iron pry-bar into the mud, his scarred bare chest glistening with oily water drops.
“Bad air,” Tie Shan rumbled, his thick nostrils flaring as he tested the underground draft. “Smells like brimstone.”
Lin Tao closed his right eye, looking down the dark hall entirely through his left.
The visual display of the Sovereign Engine was a blinding storm of glowing data:
Thirty paces ahead, suspended along the ceiling of the drift by rusted iron brackets, was something that no ordinary miner had ever recognized.
It wasn’t a natural stone vein. It was an exposed Precursor energy channel. A six-sided pipe of dark, seamless fiery glass, two feet in width. He carried millions of gallons of raw, high-pressure liquid spiritual energy from the underground mantle to the floating palaces of the Upper Sect.
The channel was ancient, cracked, and weeping.
Through his left eye, Lin Tao examined the physical structure of the pipe. The fiery glass was not amorphous. It was cast with tiny six-sided grain boundaries that functioned as high-hum insulating waveguides. Along the outer surface, etched Precursor bus traces—lines of silver-palladium alloy no thicker than a spider’s silk—flickered with uneven voltage spikes. The heat padding layer had fully spalled away, eroded by thousands of years of acidic underground steam.
Through a hairline fissure in the dark glass pipe, liquid spiritual energy was leaking into the damp air. Not as a golden mystical mist, but as fierce, violet spark arcs that snapped and hissed against the wet dark rock walls like agitated vipers.
Every time a spark arc discharged into the damp air, the surrounding methane gas flashed with a tiny, blue ghost-flame that put out only. That was because the surrounding moisture level was near one hundred percent.
“A high-voltage power trunk line running unshielded through a stuffy methane pocket,” Lin Tao murmured, his heart beating fast with cold test horror. “Who engineered this disaster?”
In a modern heavy-duty work-yard, running unshielded high-voltage power cables through an unvented gas pipe hub would result in immediate criminal prosecution for every engineer on site. Here, the Azure Cloud Sect had simply nailed a wooden board over the fissure and assigned twenty slaves to haul ore until the tunnel blew up.
“Look at the ground,” Tie Shan whispered, pointing his massive finger toward the muck.
Scattered through the drainage gutter lay the rusted pickaxes and half-rotted wicker baskets of the last shift. Beside a broken timber prop lay a human ribs, half-dissolved by the acidic runoff, coated in a crust of yellow sulfur crystals.
An old miner sat slumped on a heap of shale twenty paces down the tunnel. His skin covered in wept heat-blisters, his breath rattling in his throat like dry pebbles. He looked up at them with clouded, feverish eyes.
“New meat,” the old man rasped, his cracked lips bleeding. “Don’t light a lamp. Don’t strike iron. When the purple snake on the ceiling screams, dive into the gutter and pray your mother gave you a short neck.”
Tie Shan stepped forward through the steaming water.
The young giant knelt beside the dying elder, setting his heavy pry-bar in the mud. He reached into his belt, pulled out their wooden canteen of cold spring water. Then he lifted the old miner’s head with infinite gentleness.
“Drink, uncle,” Tie Shan rumbled softly.
The old man drank with desperate, trembling swallows, water spilling over his sunken chin. A faint color returned to his hollow cheeks.
“How long have you been here, uncle?” Lin Tao asked quietly, stepping beside them.
“Six moons,” the old man wheezed, coughing up a globule of black thick spit. “The shift started with twenty men. Now there’s only me and the rats. The purple fire eats the lungs before the mountain comes down. The overseers send carts down the cage, but they never come down themselves. They fear the purple snake.”
Lin Tao walked slowly past them, his boots splashing through the boiling sulfur water.
He reached into his hemp sleeve. He felt the cool, calming presence of the green jade spatial ring hidden beneath his palm. He focused his mind, querying the internal storage space.
The clay pot jar of bear-animal fat salve was intact. The spider-silk cord was holding his collarbone rigid. And the ancient checker’s token rested in the dark.
He pulled his four-inch land-mapper’s metal pen from his belt.
The cold-drawn iron needle trembled in his hand, its sharp tip humming with induced magnetic flux as it drew near the leaking glass channel.
“Tie Shan,” Lin Tao called softly over his shoulder.
The young giant stood up, his boots silent in the hot water. “Yes?”
“Don’t strike iron against stone in this drift,” Lin Tao said, his voice deadly serious. “Not with your pick. Not with your boots. A single spark will turn this entire mountain into an open fire.”
Tie Shan looked up at the snapping violet arcs along the ceiling, then down at his heavy iron pry-bar.
The giant slowly turned the tool around, gripping the cold iron with both hands, nodding once.
“No sparks,” Tie Shan said.