The dawn at minus nineteen thousand three hundred meters brought no change in the underground sky. In the deep mantle, the passage of day and night was marked only by the slow, rhythmic pulsation of the world-size heat cycle, as the core pumped fresh surges of white-hot magma along the crust-sink faults.
Arthur stood at the edge of the crystal-clear quartz shelf. He looked out across the blinding expanse of the Sea of White Flame. The sheer physical scale of the underground ocean was staggering. For eighty-two miles across the hollow mantle deep gap, waves of overload aetheric star-fire rose. Then it fell in glowing white crests, throwing off blinding sheets of spray that evaporated into rainbow-bright mist thousands of meters above.
Before launching the barge, Arthur knelt beside their main logistics crate to conduct an exhaustive inventory of their medical and razor-sharp supplies. In an environment where surrounding heat levels exceeded twelve hundred degrees, conventional pharmaceutical solutions were utterly useless.
He inspected the padded cryo-ampoules resting in their air-powered racks. Each ampoule contained three hundred drops of purified Ymir ice-slow marrow. The ultimate heat-powered arrest agent, distilled from the spinal core of the Antarctic titan. Beside the cryo-ampoules lay four canisters of packed heavy-metal coagulant, formulated with powdered bismuth and dark rock melted rock waste, capable of sealing traumatic blood ruptures in Disaster-class beasts within three seconds.
