On the southern shoulder of Mount Taiyi, overlooking the entirety of the Sovereign Basin, stood the Grand Forge of Mortals.
It wasn’t a temple, and it had no golden idols or incense burners. It was a huge open-air pavilion built of local gray dark rock and seasoned pine timbers, eighty paces long and fifty paces wide. At its center rested the largest anvil ever forged in the nine continents: a twenty-four-ton block of dense star-iron, salvaged from the shattered chassis of the Kernel Sovereign and anchored directly into the solid mountain stone of the mountain.
At the side of the great anvil stood Tie Shan.
The giant had stripped down to a soot-stained leather apron and linen work trousers. His massive chest and arms, crisscrossed with the pale scars of twenty seasons of war, were slick with sweat in the blasting heat of the twin blast furnaces. In his right hand, he held a specially balanced twenty-eight-pound forging sledge. In his left, a pair of four-foot iron tongs holding a white-hot metal bar of refined steel.
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
Each strike of Tie Shan’s sledge rang across the valley like a bronze bell. It sent showers of bright orange sparks cascading onto the dark rock floor:
