The sound of heavy bronze deadbolts engaging on the outside of the star-iron gate echoed through the sealed chamber like the final strokes of a headsman’s bell.
One. Two. Three. Four.
Four solid-iron deadbolts, each three inches thick and operated by an outside ratchet gearwork, locked the ten-ton star-iron slab into the granite foundation walls. Outside, the muffled sound of heavy chains being wound around the locking bars confirmed that Meng had left nothing to chance. He had sealed the tomb from the outside with enough physical iron to withstand a battering ram.
Inside the circular crucible, the heat began its terrifying, exponential climb.
The air inside the chamber turned into an invisible fire of white-hot gas. Every breath in scorched the nasal passages. Within thirty seconds, the dry sweat on Lin Tao’s brow boiled away the instant it emerged from his pores, leaving fine white crystals of stone salt crusted upon his skin. The heavy scent of sulfur, boiled away lead, and burning demon oil gathered in choking clouds beneath the ceiling arches.
Tie Shan leaped forward, his heavy boots ringing against the blistering iron floor plates.
The young giant planted his feet into the stone, gripped his twelve-pound cold-drawn iron pry-bar with both hands, wedged the chisel-point into the tiny seam beneath the ten-ton star-iron gate, and heaved upward with his full, terrifying Iron-Bone strength.
CLANG!
The muscles across Tie Shan’s back and shoulders swelled until the veins bulged like thick blue ropes. His bronze skin turned an angry, flushed red under the blasting heat. The heavy iron bar groaned under thousands of pounds of bending torque. Even with the tough skeletal thickness of a Peak Iron-Bone fighter, the laws of leverage and mass couldn’t be cheated.
The star-iron gate didn’t budge a single tiny fraction of an inch.
It was held in place by four deadbolts and ten tons of gravity crushing force. Even a mid-Foundation Establishment martial master couldn’t breach such a barrier with brute physical power alone. The searing heat from the door traveled straight through the iron bar. It scorched the tough calluses on Tie Shan’s palms until the smell of scorched leather rose into the air.
Tie Shan’s breath came in ragged, wheezing gasps, his chest heaving as hot gas seared his lungs.
“Gate is locked,” Tie Shan rumbled, his voice strained but fully empty of panic. “Heavy iron. Can’t budge.”
“Drop the bar, Tie Shan,” Lin Tao said calmly, stepping beside him. “The gate was designed to hold sixty thousand tons of molten alloy. You can’t break it with muscle.”
Lin Tao reached out, his hand resting lightly on the giant’s broad, trembling shoulder. “Conserve your breath. Every deep lungful of this gas destroys your throat lining. Breathe shallowly through your nose.”
Lin Tao turned his back on the sealed door, his left eye blazing with glowing-green map point grids that mapped the four-space-folding shape of the circular vault.
The ball-shaped Precursor core was glowing with an unbearable, blinding white-orange bright glare. The sound it produced was no longer a sound whine. It was a deep, faster-than-sound roar of twelve point four cycles per second that shook through the marrow of their bones, rattling their teeth in their jaws. Around the circular chamber, thick copper steam channels were shuddering wildly, their soldered seams beginning to cry molten lead that hissed into the floor channels.
Behind the central core. There, the main cooling channels intersected the foundation bedrock, two load-bearing partition planes met at an acute angle of thirty-seven point four degrees.
Under Lin Tao’s test tracking data, the intersection was not a solid wall of stone.
The ancient Precursor builders had built the heat holding baffles. Then, the routine calculating blasting heat spreading had assumed a flat shape. But at the acute junction of the two foundation plates, the map point boundaries overlapped by three point eight tiny fractions of an inch.
In that tiny sharp-angled seam, the blasting heat math dropped to zero.
It was an unrendered island of total cold sitting in the center of an eleven-hundred-degree cremation chamber.
Lin Tao drew the four-inch cold-drawn steel land-mapper metal pen from his hip sheath. He pointed toward the dark corner behind the intake pipe hub.
“Follow my footsteps, Tie Shan,” Lin Tao ordered quietly. “Don’t step outside my shadow.”
Tie Shan looked at the corner. To the giant’s mortal eyes, there was nothing there but two scorched slabs of star-iron meeting at an acute angle. It was surrounded by swirling curtains of white-hot flame that were already melting the copper rivets in the floor. The heat was staggering—everyone could feel the smell of scorched hair, singing flesh, and boiling sulfur.
Yet Tie Shan didn’t hesitate for a split second.
He lowered his heavy iron pry-bar. He tucked his head into his shoulders, and followed directly behind Lin Tao’s heels. He stepped into the blinding white vortex of fire as if walking into a quiet temple courtyard.
In the brutal calculus of survival, Tie Shan had learned that the boy with the steel needle didn’t see the world as stone and flame. He saw the world as a broken machine, and where the machine had cracked, a man could stand untouched by the wrath of the gods.
The heat was escalating with terrifying speed.
Around the circular chamber, the thick copper steam channels were beginning to warp. Their solder joints wept streams of melted lead that hissed into the fiery gutters. The air had turned into an invisible kiln of dry, skin-burning gas that sucked the moisture from their lungs with every ragged breath. If they remained in the open chamber for another ninety seconds, their tracheas would blister shut, choking them long before the flames touched their clothes.
Lin Tao reached the acute corner, dropping to his knees on the blistering floor plates. He raised the four-inch steel metal pen, aligning the sharp plumb point with the tiny hairline fissure between the star-iron baffles.
The air around the needle was beginning to distort, shimmering with rainbow-bright ripples of violet refraction as the physical fabric of the chamber buckled under contradictory heat counts.
“Brace your shoulders, Tie Shan,” Lin Tao whispered, his vision swimming with glowing-green vectors. “The threshold is about to open.”