"Blessings of the Main God! Light the kiln!"
"Blessings of the Great Fire Stone Spirit! Light it!..."
The sacrifice in Leijin Town began at Morning Sun and ended at noon. Next came the brick kilns' lighting ceremony! A row of eight brick kilns, each three meters tall, had been filled with thousands of red-clay brick blanks, fine black coal balls riddled with holes, and kindling for starting the fire. And at a command from High Priest Ge Niao, the eight Priest Apprentices all wore sacred expressions as they lit the fuel at the fire mouths!
"Whoosh... boom!..."
Eight tongues of flame slowly rose, burning larger and larger. Faint blue smoke drifted from the kiln mouths, growing thicker and thicker. Countless tribesmen, filled with piety, bowed their heads in awe toward the miraculous kiln houses that could turn mud into stone. Not far away, the pottery kilns were also smoking, and the workshops smelting bronze were even more wreathed in fire and smoke, never ceasing by day or night.
Viewed from afar, all of Leijin Town was like a vast Volcano, not only spreading a thin veil of smoke and dust, but also surging with the power of magma! And the source of this power lay in the rich metal deposits along the northwestern coast, in the Fire Stone Coal belt stretching for hundreds of li, and in the flame Divine Force guided by the Main God!
In the eyes of the ignorant tribes around them, although the Leijin Great Tribe possessed "thunder and gold-copper," what inspired even more dread and yearning was the "god-gifted craft" that manipulated flame and made brick, stone, and metal! It was precisely by relying on this god-gifted craft that the towering pyramid Temple rose from the ground, that walls two or three meters high gradually