The black ice under Meng Guan’s boots screamed as the domain unlocked.
It wasn’t a metaphor.
The thousand-year-old frozen ground emitted a high-hum sound screech. It shook through the bedrock like thousands of needles grinding against stone.
A wave of black frost, so dense it swallowed all light, exploded outward from the dais in a thirty-pace expanding ring.
The heat in the underground cathedral collapsed wildly.
Negative thirty. Negative forty-five. Negative sixty degrees.
At negative sixty degrees, the laws of mortal biology ceased to apply.
The surrounding moisture in the cave didn’t simply freeze. It turned straight into ash into millions of tiny, razor-sharp ice crystals that hovered in the air like suspended diamond dust.
