Two leagues along the underground canal, the silence of the sewers was wiped out by the ear-splitting roar of industry.
Lin Tao and Tie Shan halted at the mouth of an arched brick drainage under-road drain.
Ahead of them opened a huge underground deep gap three miles wide and five hundred paces high—the Lower Artisan Quarters of the Celestial Capital.
It was an infernal city carved into the living rock beneath the royal foundations.
Thousands of soot-blackened apartments. It was built from scrap timber, hammered iron sheeting, and discarded kiln brick, clung to the cave walls like swallows’ nests. Through the center of the deep gap ran massive blast furnaces eighty paces tall. It roared with potion-made fire as they smelted star-brass and refined spirit ores day and night.
Huge chains, each link forged from two tons of star-iron, hung down from the ceiling of the cave, supporting suspended platforms where thousands of mortal artisans toiled under the flickering glare of smelting crucibles.
The air was dense with rotten-egg soot, powdered quartz dust, and the ear-splitting clatter of steam hammers pounding out armor plate for the royal legions. The stone-built scale of the lower slums was staggering in its crude, functional brutality. The cave roof was crisscrossed by thousands of star-iron steam channels, pressure pipes, and load-bearing tie-rods, spanning hundreds of paces between the jagged dark rock walls. Every few moments, a massive pressure-relief valve high above would vent with an ear-splitting hiss, discharging a geyser of white steam that…
