BOOM.
The impact was not the dull thud of leather striking stone.
It was the bone-shaking blast of twenty thousand pounds of high-pressure force meeting porous, brittle white lime-chalk.
Lu Chen’s iron-wrapped heel shattered the surface gravel, punching three inches into the solid limestone bedrock.
Outward fracture lines spiderwebbed through the trench floor across a radius of thirty paces, splitting the gray chalk into jagged, linked slabs.
At the same time, the Five-Viscera Blood Cauldron let loose its underground purge.
Lu Chen opened the gut-deep exhaust ports along his main thigh blood vessels, dumping a huge surge of eighty-degree fire heat directly through the sole of his boot into the underground fissure network.
Limestone was notoriously poor at conducting gentle heat. But it was exceptionally unsafe to violent heat shock.
