The northern road didn’t lead to salvation. It dropped into a steaming bowl of poison.
Eight miles north of the Sector Four quarry basin, the granite peaks of the Azure Cloud Range fractured into a jagged fiery volcano bowl that smelled always of boiling sulfur, burnt bone-char. Then it boiled away liquid silver. This was the Lower Potion Slag Pavilion. The dumping ground where the proud potion-made grandmasters of the Upper Sect discarded the toxic refuse of their failed divine pills.
Lin Tao and Tie Shan walked down the winding dark rock road as dawn broke in a murky haze of purple and ochre smog.
Beneath his patched linen tunic, the spider-silk splint held Lin Tao’s fractured left collar bone in rigid immobility. Three weeks had passed since the disaster in the Disciplinary Hall. The steady application of Doctor Su’s bone-knitting marrow salve had allowed the broken bone ends to knit into a dense, hardened bridge. The skin across his right palm was tough and leathery, scarred by the high-voltage spark bypass, and the stripe of void-frostbite along his left forearm bone had faded into a dull, silvery brand that no longer throbbed in the cold.
Beside him, Tie Shan carried their entire worldly inventory in a heavy wicker pack, his twelve-pound iron pry-bar resting across his broad shoulder like a headsman’s staff.
The terrain of the volcano bowl was a nightmare of heavy-duty waste.
Towering mounds of shattered clay crucibles, cracked bronze cooking pots, and glass-fused melted rock waste rose like jagged tumuli across the volcano bowl floor. Through the center of the valley ran an open trench of bubbling, rainbow-bright red slurry. The acidic run-off from three hundred potion-made workshops above. Thick plumes of yellow sulfur smoke hissed from natural fumaroles. It drifted between clusters of soot-blackened stone huts where hundreds of ragged, coughing laborers shoveled smoking waste scum with iron spades.
“Heavy air,” Tie Shan rumbled, his nostrils flaring as he tasted the acidic vapor. “Tastes of copper.”
“Lead and liquid silver,” Lin Tao corrected quietly, his eyes scanning the outside tracking data in his left eye.
Through his augmented vision, the volcano bowl was not merely a garbage dump. It was a massive, uncontrolled heap of fragmented memory allocations.
Every time a potion-maker in the Upper Sect tried to force high-grade spiritual herbs into a divine pill and failed, the violent energetic collapse shattered the cooking pot’s internal holding arrays. The volatile energetic leftovers—uncollected spiritual essences mixed with heavy-metal catalysts—were dumped down the mountain chutes in unsealed crucibles, leaking raw power into the soil.
To traditional fighters, this residue was known as “Pill Poison” (Dan Du), an incurable, rotting filth that rotted the spirit veins of any mortal foolish enough to breathe it.
To Lin Tao, it was simply uncollected garbage data.
At the entrance to the central office stockade stood Slag Overseer Meng.
Meng was a squat, broad-shouldered fighter of the mid-Foundation Establishment realm. His greasy hair was tied in a loose knot with a bone pin. His face was pitted with small chemical burns, his front teeth missing from an ancient cooking pot explosion. His filthy silk robes were stained with dried potion-made waste scum. He was chewing on a bitter root. It spat black juice into the gravel as Lin Tao and Tie Shan approached.
“Halt, quarry rats,” Meng growled, his voice sounding like two grinding stones. “State your business before I have the guards toss you into the burning sulfur pits.”
Lin Tao reached into his tunic. Then he drew the golden parchment scroll sealed with red beeswax and Disciplinary Elder Song’s vermilion blood-stamp.
“Personnel transfer decree,” Lin Tao said, extending the scroll with an unrushed, steady hand. “By order of Disciplinary Elder Song. Reassigned to the Lower Slag Pavilion as scrap handlers.”
Meng snatched the scroll, his squinted eyes scanning the bold calligraphy and the official court seals. His scowl deepened with every character, his yellowed fingers twitching against the parchment.
“Elder Song’s blood-seal...” Meng muttered, looking up at Lin Tao with deep suspicion and greedy resentment. “A formal decree from the Punishment Bureau. They said you brought down half the courthouse with an iron needle. They said you were a pair of rabid dogs that Song wanted buried where no one would ever find your bones.”
“We’re here to shovel waste scum, Overseer,” Lin Tao replied evenly. “Nothing more.”
Meng sneered, rolling the scroll and thrusting it into his belt.
“You want waste scum? You’ll have enough waste scum to fill your lungs until you cough blood!” Meng barked, pointing a blackened finger toward the deepest, most dangerous trench at the far northern edge of the volcano bowl. “Pit Seven! That’s your post! Every afternoon, the Sky-Fire Pill Pavilion dumps twenty carts of exploded copper crucibles and boiling melted rock waste down that chute. Your quota is five hundred pounds of cleaned bronze scrap and fifty pounds of reusable copper flux every seven days. If your tally is short by a single ounce, I dock your grain rations for a month!”
“Understood,” Lin Tao said.
“Take the stone shed at the edge of the pit,” Meng spat, turning his back. “And don’t bother crying when the night fumes rot your throat. No one leaves Pit Seven on their own feet.”
Tie Shan stepped forward, his massive frame casting a long shadow over the overseer. Meng flinched involuntarily, his hand darting toward the bronze heavy club at his hip, before scowling and marching back toward the guardhouse.
Lin Tao and Tie Shan walked down the narrow gravel trail leading to Pit Seven.
The pit was a sunken tiered arena of dark fiery dark rock, fifty paces wide and thirty feet deep, littered with thousands of cracked, soot-covered cooking pot shards. In the corner stood an abandoned stone hut, its timber roof long since burned away by acid rain. But its thick dark rock walls remained intact.
Tie Shan dropped his heavy wicker pack onto the dirt, picked up an iron spade. Then he began step by step clearing the fallen melted rock waste from the doorway.
Lin Tao walked into the center of the pit.
He knelt beside a shattered bronze crucible half-buried in cold red ash. The metal was heavy, six inches thick, cast from ancient star-copper and inscribed with worn potion-made glyphs.
Lin Tao rested his right palm against the cracked bronze.
Deep within the fractured lattice of the metal, a faint, rhythmic pulse rang against his skin—a high-hum shaking of exactly twelve million cycles per second.
Through his left eye, the reality screen blinked into focus:
A faint smile touched the corner of Lin Tao’s lips.
The alchemists above had dumped this crucible because the vessel had cracked during high-heat refinement. But inside the shattered bronze, the main healing essence—packed, refined dragon-marrow root—was still trapped in an unreleased memory state. He waited for someone who knew how to dereference the address.
Lin Tao reached into his belt and drew the four-inch cold-drawn steel land-mapper metal pen.
The hunt in the scrap heap had begun.