Smoke still drifted outside the Underground Palace in Luodu.
Broken stone pillars lay scattered across the ground, and the great bronze cauldron still radiated lingering warmth.
Yue Xiaofei sheathed his saber, the black-and-gold blade giving a soft click.
He did not linger in Luodu for even a minute.
He held the severed lock of hair his sister Yue Lingfei had left behind tightly against his chest. The dried drop of blood burned against his skin like a branding iron.
"The plane is ready."
With a strawberry lollipop between her lips, Han Duoduo tapped rapidly on her portable computer with both hands.
She looked up at Yue Xiaofei beneath her short, dark-purple hair.
"Your little mouse here just accessed the Northern Frontier Theater's latest satellite thermal scanning feed. Something's... wrong over at Changbai Mountain."
Yue Xiaofei turned to look at her.
"Wrong how?"
"There's activity beneath the Heavenly Pool."
Han Duoduo turned the computer screen halfway around and held it in front of Yue Xiaofei.
On the screen, a vast stretch of the icebound Changbai Mountain Range in the north was marked red.
"The surface temperature there is currently minus forty-two degrees, and the ice is over three meters thick. But the thermal scan shows a massive heat source a thousand meters beneath the ice, with a temperature above six hundred degrees."
Han Duoduo crunched the lollipop between her teeth.
"And underwater sonar detected a strange sound frequency. It sounds a lot like war drums on an ancient battlefield, going off once every three minutes."
Yue Xiaofei spoke. "The last place my eldest brother Yue Feng appeared before he disappeared was the Heavenly Pool on Changbai Mountain."
The emperor engine pulsed slowly in his chest, giving off a low rumble.
His father was in the Kunlun Ruins, and his sister was