Inside the central command pavilion at the Iron Dragon Gap, animal fat lamps flickered against the heavy canvas walls. He cast dancing shadows over a large sand table.
Gathered around the table were Tie Shan, Captain Wu, Master Zhang of the Azure Mirror Guild, and seven senior masons from Mount Taiyi. At the center of the sand table, Lin Tao had drawn a precise scale diagram using his brass measuring tongs and spirit chalk. He had mapped the fifty-li section of the sky outer edge facing their vanguard, dividing it into nine distinct sharp-angled sectors corresponding to the coiling dragons above.
“Look at the arrangement of the golden dragons above,” Lin Tao said. He pointed with his four-inch star-white-gold metal pen.
The gathered mortals leaned closer. Through the open pavilion flaps, the rhythmic golden pulse of the barrier lit up the northern clouds with a hypnotic, twenty-four-hertz throbbing glare that painted the canvas in pulsing amber stripes.
“There are nine main snake-like projections in the upper thermosphere,” Lin Tao explained. He drew nine circles in the sand with the metal pen tip. “Each dragon doesn’t guard the entire continent at once. That would need impossible calculating exact timing across thousands of leagues. Instead, each dragon acts as a main processing core, governing an ingress sector of roughly fifty-five li in width.”
