The granite slab groaned. Roots were no longer just tapping against it; they were prying it open. A thick, woody tentacle slithered through the crack, seeking the warmth of the tunnel air.
"Now!" Lin Qinghe shouted.
Ji Han kicked the door open.
He didn't step out into open air. He stepped into a green mouth.
The Iron-Blood Grass had filled the trench completely. It was a tangled wall of serrated vines and metallic leaves, writhing like a pit of snakes. The moment the door opened, the vines surged toward him, sensing the heat of his armor.
SCRAPE. GRIND.
Vines wrapped around his arms, his legs, his neck. The Bastion Plate screeched under the tension. The grass was trying to crush him inside his own shell.
"Get off!"
Ji Han roared, his voice amplified by a crude burst of Spirit. He didn't swing his pick; there was no room to swing.
He clutched the Black Iron Strongbox to his chest with both arms, curling into a ball as he pushed forward. He was a linebacker charging through a defensive line made of razor wire.
He drove his boots into the mud, tearing through the root system. He felt the thorns biting into the leather of his greaves, seeking the flesh beneath.
He reached the center of the trench—the spot directly above their main living space.
"Clear the room," Ji Han growled.
He dropped the box onto the writhing mass of roots. He didn't unlock it gently. He smashed the lock with the pommel of his War Pick.
He kicked the lid open.
WHOOSH.
It wasn't an explosion of fire. It was an implosion of silence.
The Yin Spirit Pearl, exposed to the humid, boiling air of the Spring surface, reacted violently. It sucked the heat out of the world.
A sphere of white frost expanded from the box at the speed of sound.
CRACK-CRACK-CRACK.
The sound was like a thousand gunshots going off at once. The vines wrapping Ji Han froze instantly, turning from flexible steel into brittle glass. The green sap inside them crystallized, shattering the cell walls.
The frost wave washed over Ji Han. His armor turned white. His visor frosted over. But his internal Grey Core, fortified by the Myriapod meat and the Level 3 compression, spun wildly, eating the cold before it could stop his heart.
He stood up, shattering the frozen vines around him. They crumbled into green dust.
He looked around.
He was standing in a perfect circle of winter, ten meters in diameter. The ground was frozen hard as iron. The Iron-Blood Grass within the circle was dead—shattered, black statues of vegetation.
Beyond the circle, the jungle raged. The wall of green pressed against the invisible line of temperature, but dared not cross. The frost was anathema to the Yang-charged plants.
"Perimeter established," Ji Han rasped, his breath clouding.
He reached down and kicked the lid of the box shut, but didn't lock it. He left it slightly ajar, just enough to bleed the cold into the soil without freezing the entire continent.
He climbed out of the frozen trench, his boots crunching on the dead grass.
He stood on the rim of his crater and looked at the world of Year 2.
It was breathtaking. And terrifying.
The flat, grey plain of ash was gone. In the span of a few hours, a prehistoric jungle had risen. Trees with trunks like twisted iron pillars soared fifty meters into the air, their leaves broad and metallic, catching the violet sunlight. Massive flowers, red and pulsing like open wounds, dotted the canopy.
The air hummed with the sound of insects—not the stealthy scratching of the beetles, but the loud, buzzing drone of dragonflies the size of hawks.
"It's the Carboniferous period," Lin Qinghe's voice came from the trench. She had climbed up, wrapped in her furs, stepping carefully into the frozen zone. "High oxygen. High heat. High Qi. Everything grows big. Everything grows fast."
She stood beside him, looking at the wall of jungle that surrounded their small island of ice.
"The Novice Barrier," she pointed.
Ji Han squinted. Through the dense canopy, he could just barely see the golden shimmer of the barrier in the distance. The jungle stopped there. Beyond the barrier, the fog of war obscured everything.
"We are in a terrarium," Ji Han said. "And someone turned up the humidity."
THUMP.
The ground shook.
It wasn't a root. It was a footstep.
Ji Han and Lin Qinghe froze.
From the dense treeline to the north, a tree snapped. Not a branch—a whole tree. It fell with a crash that shook the birds from the sky.
Something was moving through the jungle. Something tall enough to look over the canopy.
A head emerged from the leaves. It was reptilian, scaled in green and gold, with a crest of bone that looked like a crown. It chewed on a mouthful of metallic leaves, grinding them with a sound like a rock crusher.
[System Notification: Creature Detected.] [Iron-Jaw Titanosaur (Juvenile).] [Rank: Level 4 (Low).] [Disposition: Neutral / Herbivore.]
"Level 4," Ji Han whispered, gripping his War Pick. "That's a dinosaur."
"A herbivore," Lin Qinghe corrected, though her face was pale. "It eats the iron grass. Which means its bones are metal. Its skin is plate mail."
The Titanosaur ignored them. It was interested in the lush canopy. But its tail swished, leveling a patch of forest the size of a house.
"If that thing steps on our tunnel," Ji Han said, "we collapse."
"It won't," Lin Qinghe said, looking at their feet. "Look."
The Titanosaur had taken a step toward them, but then snorted. It turned its head away, repulsed.
"The cold," Lin Qinghe realized. "It hates the cold. We are too small to be food, and too cold to be comfortable. To it, we are a puddle of slush."
Ji Han relaxed his grip slightly. The Yin Spirit Pearl wasn't just a weedkiller. It was a repellent.
"So we stay in the circle," Ji Han said.
"For now," Lin Qinghe agreed. "But Ji Han... look at the shadows."
Ji Han looked. In the shade of the giant ferns, beneath the Titanosaur's feet, things were moving. Smaller things. Fast things. Pack hunters.
"The herbivores bring the carnivores," Ji Han recalled her words.
"We need walls," Lin Qinghe said. "The trench is not enough. We need a fortress. Above ground."
Ji Han looked at the frozen iron-trees he had shattered with the cold. He looked at the massive trees beyond.
"I have a War Pick," Ji Han said. "And I have the strength of a Myriapod."
He rolled his shoulders.
"Time to start logging."