Two thousand paces beneath the clouds of heaven, the world was held aloft by brute building.
Lin Tao halted at the edge of the star-iron narrow high walkway, his traveling coat whipping against his calves in the freezing downdraft. Beside him, Tie Shan leaned against the rusty stone railing, his breath puffing into white plumes that dissolved instantly against the huge star-brass pillars rising into the gloom.
Above them rose the underbelly of the Celestial Capital.
It didn’t look like the poetic descriptions recorded in mortal temple scrolls. There were no misty pavilions floating upon calm sky qi, no immortal cranes gliding across rainbow bridges. From this vantage point, the capital was an inverted mountain of giant stone stonework. Hundreds of millions of tons of white green jade, quarried granite, and heavy star-brass plates bolted together with rivets the size of millstones.
Huge foundation pylons, each eighty paces thick, plunged straight down from the clouds into the underground bedrock.
The sheer scale was overwhelming.
Where the unrendered void met the capital’s gravity boundary, the air underwent violent squeezing. Gale-force updrafts of white-hot exhaust air from the sky kitchens and bathhouses collided with the sub-zero empty pocket of the boundary deep gap, producing swirling vortex clouds of freezing fog that howled through the star-brass roof beams like wounded beasts.
