The Great Southern Gate of the Azure Cloud Sect was an imposing massive stone archway carved from dark stone, thirty paces wide and sixty paces high, marking the legal boundary between the sacred mountain territory and the mortal empire below.
At the hour of the fourth watch, two hours before dawn, the grand gates swung open with the deep, groaning rumble of iron hinges that had guarded the southern highway for eight hundred years.
A light, freezing mist drifted down from the pine ridges, coating the dark rock bridge in a delicate sheen of frost.
Lin Tao stepped through the archway, his dark wool traveling cloak billowing softly in the night wind.
At his chest, the star-gold Golden Phoenix Medallion and the Grand Clerk’s Dragon Medallion hung side by side, their polished surfaces catching the pale light of the waning crescent moon. At his right hip, the four-inch steel land-mapper metal pen rested in its leather sheath, its diamond point sharp, true, and ready for whatever broken machinery lay ahead.
The three thousand marble steps were lined with ancient bronze urns burning aged sandalwood. Their fragrant smoke mixed with the cool, dew-scented mountain breeze. Outer court students who had spent their entire lives memorizing lineage charts and cultivating old family humility stared at Lin Tao’s unarmored figure in stunned, breathless silence. To their traditional minds, a mortal laborer was a creature of dirt, incapable of touching the higher mysteries of heaven. Yet here was a boy with a broken dantian…
