Three thousand meters below the Antarctic ice sheet, the wind died fully, replaced by a choking, hyper-dense quiet.
The walls of the Zero-Rift had tightly packed from brittle firn into solid, sapphire-blue ice-slow bedrock. Under thousands of sea-weights of earth-shaking pressure, all air bubbles had long since been squeezed out of the ice. That left the canyon walls semi-clear, glassy, and smooth as polished black glass.
Arthur rappelled down the sheer face, his magnetic boots finding purchase on the crystal-clear facets Titus carved ahead of him. Every sixty meters, Titus drove a two-meter dark rock anchor pin into the wall, securing the main braided-steel descent cable with clockwork finality.
Arthur checked the outside readout on his wrist display:
The sky aether had crossed one hundred and thirty parts per million.
At this concentration, raw mana was no longer an invisible surrounding force. It hung in the trench like a faint, living-glow cobalt mist, eddying around Arthur’s shoulders with the sluggish thickness of chilled oil. Every breath in pulled the heavy mist against the baked-clay filters of his breathing mask. There, the heating elements sizzled softly. That turned the volatile particulates into warm, dry air.
Arthur could feel the heavy specks pressing against the intake filters. Without his friend scrubbers, every breath would have seeded his lung tree with sharp stone-glass crystals. But through the five-pillar soul-sync network, Grimm’s ancient bone marrow acted as a living outward-pulling filter.
