The air in the collapsed drift had turned into a choking swamp of carbon dioxide.
Men were gasping like fish thrown onto dry river gravel, their fingernails digging into the damp mud. In less than twenty minutes, mass asphyxiation would claim the entire shift. The surrounding heat was rising as eighty bodies radiated feverish body-energy heat in the sealed chamber, making the air thick, wet, and nauseating.
Lin Tao didn’t hesitate.
He raised his right arm, gripping the four-inch steel land-mapper metal pen with white-knuckled intensity. His left eye locked onto the swaying intersection map point where the fifty-ton granite monolith intersected the bedrock wall.
In his field of vision, the a deep hum refresh cycle was counting down in heartbeat increments:
Twenty-two... Twenty-three... Zero.
Lin Tao drove the steel metal pen forward.
He didn’t strike the rock with physical force. He pushed in the tip into the exact tiny boundary intersection at the precise heartbeat of the frame refresh.
TICK.
The sound was not the sharp clinking of steel on granite. It was a bizarre, muffled thwip—the sound of tearing silk amplified ten thousand times.
The solid granite face rippled.
Where the fifty-ton slab met the wall, the stone lost its opacity, blurring into a swirling, semi-clear eddy of dark slate and violet soft glow. The physical crash mesh collapsed along a three-foot-wide upright fissure. It showed the empty, air-filled drift of the abandoned drainage bypass on the other side. A blast of cold, clean air rushed through the opening, smelling of mountain moss and distant rain.
“Now!” Lin Tao hissed through clenched teeth. “Push him through!”
Tie Shan gripped Old Man Geng by the collar of his tunic and shoved the weeping, confused smith headfirst into the rippling stone.
Old Geng shrieked, throwing his hands up to shield his skull from the impact with solid granite.
There was no impact.
Old Geng’s body passed straight through the face of the stone monolith as if it were a curtain of cold morning mist. His scared scream vanished instantly into the bypass tunnel on the other side, replaced a second later by a confused, echoing gasp of clean, cool, moving air.
“I... I’m through!” Old Geng’s voice echoed faintly through the rock. “By the Jade Emperor, I’m through! There’s air! There’s fresh air here!”
The darkness of Sector Four erupted into a frenzy of gasping, desperate motion.
“Silence!” Tie Shan roared into the dark, his voice booming with the power of an iron gavel. “Form the line! The first man who crowds the stone dies by my bar!”
The miners, scared and awed beyond human reason, obeyed. They fell into a ragged, shivering queue along the left timber wooden props. To their minds, Lin Tao was no longer a seventeen-year-old debt-bound laborer. He was an ancient immortal possessing the lost, god-like art of Earth-Folding Sorcery.
One by one, the miners stepped forward into the rippling violet seam.
“Next,” Lin Tao ordered.
A sixteen-year-old boy stepped forward, trembling so wildly his teeth clicked. Tie Shan caught him by the waist and propelled him through the blurred rock. The boy vanished into the cold draft.
“Next.”
A grizzled veteran miner with a broken shoulder stumbled forward. Vanished.
“Next.”
With every human body that clipped through the non-pipe hub seam, the calculating strain on Lin Tao’s neural pathways shot up fast. The Precursor running system was attempting to resolve the mass-transport rule-break, feeding back massive corrective spark pulses through the steel metal pen anchored in his grip.
A searing, blinding agony ripped through Lin Tao’s nervous system.
Blood began to trickle from his left nostril, hot and salty, dripping down his chin and splashing onto the cold stone. His body heat spiked rapidly past thirty-nine degrees. The veins across his forehead and neck bulged like thick blue cords, throbbing with violent brain pressure. His fractured left collar bone felt as though it were being pried apart with an iron wedge.
“Faster,” Lin Tao gasped, his vision swimming with blinding white static. “Tie Shan... Push them faster...”
Tie Shan moved with brutal, machine-like smooth speed. He grabbed miners two at a time, slinging them through the rippling stone partition like sacks of grain.
Sixty passed.
Seventy passed.
Lin Tao’s right hand was trembling so wildly that the steel metal pen rattled against the bedrock. The skin of his palm was blistering, scorched by the intense heat discharge flowing through the metal. His teeth were clenched so hard that fresh blood seeped between his back teeth.
“Seventy-eight... Seventy-nine...” Tie Shan grunted, his own breath ragged with hard effort.
Tie Shan reached down and hoisted the final two men. The young laborer whose leg had been crushed by the first collapse. The unconscious assassin bound in spider silk. He hurled them both through the semi-clear fissure.
Only Tie Shan and Lin Tao remained in the tomb.
Around them, the rippling boundary began to wildly strobe, the violet light turning into an angry, jagged crimson. The map point was collapsing. The physics engine was forcing a hard reset.
“Go!” Lin Tao screamed, his voice tearing in his throat.
The air around them was whistling with the high-pitched shriek of shearing shape. Every timber prop within thirty feet of the seam was groaning. It shook with sympathetic sound frequencies as the physics engine tried to recalculate the mass of eighty missing bodies from the sealed volume.
Tie Shan paused for a split second, his dark eyes locking onto Lin Tao’s trembling, blood-streaked face.
“Move!” Lin Tao roared, his vision tunneling into a red haze of pure body agony. “I can’t hold the map point!”
Tie Shan lunged forward, throwing his massive bulk through the closing seam. The giant’s broad shoulders seemed to displace the very fabric of the air, vanishing into the swirling semi-clear vortex like a diving whale slipping beneath dark water.