Total darkness wrapped around the burial crater.
Above Lu Chen, hundreds of thousands of tons of mountain bedrock, granite vault blocks, and shattered jade terraces had collapsed into a solid underground cairn.
The underground air was thin, choking with crushed stone dust, toxic liquid silver vapor, and sulfur smoke.
Any mortal man—even an ordinary Bone Forging master or Iron Organ grandmaster—would have suffocated within two minutes, crushed flat by air pressure and lack of oxygen.
Lu Chen remained seated cross-legged on the glass-fused dark rock floor.
His lungs didn’t need rapid shallow breaths of air.
Within his gut-deep cooking pot, the internal breathing cycle of the Five-Viscera Blood Cauldron circulated pure heat qi through his core organs.
The main constraint was fuel.
