Melted rock waste Overseer Meng practically tumbled down the narrow switchback trail leading into Pit Seven.
His filthy silk robes fluttered in the acidic wind, his heavy boots slipping on loose fiery pebbles as he rushed into the sunken basin. Behind him jogged four armed guards wearing studded leather jerkins and carrying heavy iron-tipped poleaxes. Their faces were pale beneath their bronze helmets.
Meng had expected to find a pit of blackened corpses, melted bone fragments. A collapsed stone hut buried beneath fifty tons of cooling red stone waste scum. He had already drafted the official report in his mind: A tragic, unavoidable surge of fire refuse resulting from high-pressure distillation in the Upper Sect. Indentured coolies perished due to lack of vigilance.
Instead, he walked into a scene of total, baffling order.
The twenty coolies of Pit Seven were not dead. They were standing in a disciplined, orderly line beside the eastern cliff. They held shovels and wicker baskets, their faces streaked with soot but fully uninjured.
In the center of the pit, stacked in neat, spotless pyramids upon dry wooden pallets, were twelve heavy wooden crates filled with gleaming, cleaned bronze crucible shards, stripped entirely of their toxic black melted rock waste. Beside them sat six heavy, metal bars of solid, refined copper flux, shimmering with an authentic metal sheen.
Lin Tao stood beside the crates, holding a wooden clipboard with a fresh bamboo tally sheet.
Beside him towered Tie Shan, his massive arms crossed over his broad chest, his twelve-pound iron pry-bar planted into the dirt between his feet.
Meng skidded to a halt ten paces away, his breath coming in ragged, wheezing gasps that rattled deep in his diseased bronchi. His small, piggy eyes darted wildly from the neat crates of cleaned bronze to the empty, unburned stone hut, and finally down to the open mouth of the two-thousand-foot drainage shaft.
“What... What’s this?” Meng stammered, spit spraying from his cracked lips. “Where is the waste scum? The Sky-Fire Pavilion dumped two hundred tons of boiling red stone down this chute! Where did it go?”
Lin Tao dipped his horsehair brush into dark black ink. That made a neat stroke on the bamboo scroll before looking up with calm, test eyes.
“The waste scum was unstable, Overseer,” Lin Tao said, his voice flat, steady, and devoid of any emotional inflection. “The channel experienced an anomalous reduction in surface pushback. The liquid waste discharged cleanly down the ancient emergency water gate into the lower magma vents, exactly as the Precursor drainage stonework intended.”
Meng’s eyes bulged. “Precursor stonework? The lower water gate has been jammed with cold hardwood and boulders for forty years! It took thirty oxen to budge it an inch when my predecessor tried to clear it!”
“The wooden props was rotten, Overseer,” Lin Tao replied quietly. “Tie Shan moved the timber with his pry-bar. A single push.”
Meng turned his gaze toward Tie Shan.
The giant didn’t move. He simply stared down at the overseer with cold, unmoving indifference. But Meng’s sharp eyes caught the transformation. The thick, hideous keloid whip scars that had marked Tie Shan as a broken slave were gone. The giant’s skin was smooth, bronze. Then he radiated the dense, heavy presence of an Iron-Bone master.
Meng’s heart gave a violent, scared hitch.
Iron-Bone? Meng thought, a cold sweat breaking out across his forehead. He was a crippled coolie with broken ribs three weeks ago! How could he reach Iron-Bone in a toxic pit eating moldy grain?
Meng stepped toward the wooden pallets, desperate to find a flaw, a rule-break, an excuse to order his guards to strike. He reached out with a trembling hand, snatched a metal bar of the refined copper flux. Then he examined it under the sunlight.
The metal was pure. It hadn’t been melted in a wood fire. The crystal-clear structure was uniform, dense, and cold.
“Your quota...” Meng rasped, clutching the heavy metal bar against his ribs. “The weekly quota is five hundred pounds of bronze and fifty pounds of flux. You... You only arrived yesterday!”
“This is six hundred pounds of Grade-Two bronze scrap, Overseer,” Lin Tao said. He tapped the bamboo scroll with his brush. “And sixty-four pounds of seventy-percent copper flux. The quota for the first seven days is fulfilled. Please apply your proof seal to the ledger.”
Meng stared at the ledger. His hands shook so wildly that the heavy copper metal bar slipped from his fingers, thudding into the soft ash between his boots.
He was trapped. In the office hierarchy of the Azure Cloud Sect, an overseer could execute a slave for laziness, sabotage, or failing quotas. But executing a laborer who had single-handedly cleared a jammed drainage shaft and delivered a week’s quota of strategic bronze in twenty-four hours was office suicide. Elder Song’s Disciplinary Bureau would use such an excuse to audit the Slag Pavilion’s books, and Meng’s embezzlement of counterfeit pills would be laid bare.
“You...” Meng whispered, his face darkening with poisonous hatred and thwarted malice. “You think you’re clever, boy. You think because Elder Song gave you a golden parchment, you can play games with me in the volcano bowl?”
Before Lin Tao could reply, Meng suddenly doubled over, clutching his chest with both hands.
A violent, hacking cough tore through the overseer’s throat. He fell to his knees in the dirt, retching wildly, coughing up a mouthful of thick, black thick spit streaked with bright red blood and silvery globules of elemental liquid silver. His face turned an alarming shade of mottled purple, his breath whistling through his squeezed tight throat pipe like a broken bellows.
The four guards stepped back in disgust, covering their noses. They knew the signs. It was the dreaded “Volcano bowl Rot”—the permanent poisoning of the bone marrow caused by thirty years of inhaling liquid silver waste scum.
Lin Tao watched the coughing overseer with cold, analytical calm distance.
Through his left eye, Meng’s internal test tracking data was flashing with severe warnings:
Forty-two days. Without radical chelation and cellular marrow repair, Meng’s lungs would liquefy. His Foundation Establishment core would collapse into rotting melted rock waste before the winter solstice.
Lin Tao stepped forward, halting three paces from the kneeling, wheezing overseer.
“The fire cough begins in the lungs, Overseer Meng,” Lin Tao said softly. His voice dropped so that only Meng could hear. “But it settles in the bone marrow. The liquid silver in your blood is crystallizing your spirit veins. If you don’t purge the waste scum, your core will rot into black water before the winter snows fall.”
Meng’s head snapped up.
Through tears of agony and blood, the overseer stared at Lin Tao in sheer, pure terror. He had consulted three inner sect apothecaries. All three had told him the same horrific truth. His core was rotting from fire poison, and only a mythical, drossless Grade-Nine Marrow-Tempering Pill—costing ten thousand silver bits—could save his life.
“You...” Meng choked out, blood dripping from his chin. “How... How do you know that?”
“I know how the elements balance, Overseer,” Lin Tao replied quietly. He turned back toward his stone hut. “Sign the ledger. We have more bronze to clean.”
Meng knelt in the cold ash. He grabbed his throbbing chest. He stared at Lin Tao’s retreating back with a mixture of burning hatred and desperate, superstitious dread.