High above the dark rock shelf, the sky was not empty.
Lin Tao pulled Tie Shan down into the narrow shadow of an overhanging limestone bluff. The stone against their backs was ice-cold and dusted with powdery white bitter salt. Tie Shan lowered his massive frame without a sound. It tucked his star-iron pry-bar beneath his thigh and held his breath.
A high-pitched, ringing whine drifted down through the dead air.
It was the distinctive sound signed name of a Celestial Void Skiff. A twin-keeled vessel forged from hammered star-brass and white cloud-wood, propelled by four counter-rotating gravity repulsion coils. Through his left eye, Lin Tao tracked the vessel as it slipped out of the matte gray upper vault.
The skiff was sixty paces long, sleek as a water snake, and plated in gleaming golden leaf.
At the prow stood an Eighth-Rank Starry Guard clad in full green jade-inlaid layered-scale armor. He held a long-shafted axe-spear topped with a glowing fortune-telling mirror. Suspended beneath the keel, an eight-foot crystal lens rotated slowly. He cast a cone of pale azure light down across the canyon walls.
Where the azure light touched the rock, small spiritual runes bloomed like glowing blue moss. It probed the stone for signs of secret training signed names, spiritual energy leakages, or spatial transport magic charms.
