At minus twenty-one thousand eight hundred meters, the dense green rock fault ended in a vast, nightmarish underground deep gap that spanned twelve miles across.
Here, the deep-rock majesty of the Earth’s mantle had been wildly disfigured. The magma that flowed through the deep gap was not the clean, blazing bright orange dark rock of the upper trenches, nor was it the radiant white star-fire of the sacred sea. It was a thick, sluggish river of oily, purple-black sludge that bubbled with toxic methane and boiled away heavy metals, coating the cave walls in thick, cancerous crusts of glass-fused void soot.
Arthur stood on the blackened dense green rock ridge. He felt the deep tragedy of the blighted biome. In its natural, uncorrupted state, this deep mantle confluence would have been a breathtaking garden of crystal-hardened olivine and radiant earth-heat springs, populated by ancient silicon-based fauna that had lived in harmony with the planet’s core since the dawn of life.
The Sovereign Chimera Order had reduced this deep-rock paradise to a festering, rotting sewer.
Arthur adjusted his test monocle, scanning the mutated beasts crawling through the purple sludge.
“Their cellular membranes are undergoing rapid apoptotic liquefaction,” Arthur observed. His tone sharp with was cold and exact disgust. “The void foul fog isn’t merely poisoning them. It’s rewriting their genomic transcripts to produce leech-like spore sacs within their chest cavities. Every mutated basilisk is an incubator designed to detonate and spread the infection to the upper trenches.”
