The Great Continental Rift didn’t look like a natural deep-rock canyon.
It looked like the world had been sliced open by a heavy-duty diamond saw ten thousand paces wide. Its sheer was dark rock precipices plunging five upright miles into an ink-black underground underworld. He stood at the rim of the cliff edge on the wind-scoured southern plateau. Lin Tao could feel the violent updraft rising from the depths. Air white-hot by ancient world-size engines, smelling sharply of scorched sulfur, bitter copper filings, and spark-charged ozone.
Beside him, Tie Shan knelt against the cold stone. He hammered a forged star-iron piton into a granite fissure with rhythmic, heavy strokes of his steel mallet.
Each impact rang out like a funeral bell against the howling void. The giant rose to his full height, his massive shoulders rolling under his dark ox-hide harness. Across his broad back rested his fourteen-pound cold-drawn iron pry-bar. Its surface newly was heavy with star-white-gold bands that caught the dim red light of the setting sun.
Lin Tao touched the heavy weight resting inside his charcoal linen coat.
The Warden’s Root Access Token—a heavy, eight-sided slab of dense star-iron and white green jade captured from the Seventh-Rank Patch Daemon on the spark-charged peak of Mount Taiyi—radiated a steady, cold shaking against his chest bone. It didn’t carry spiritual warmth. It carried the cold, unbending care of an office coded key.
