Lu Chen dropped the spiral stairs into the underground depths beneath the Hall of Literary Glory.
His boots clanged against cold pig-iron treads, each step ringing like an anvil strike in the echoing dark.
Behind him, through the jagged crater in the stone ceiling, drops of Grand Preceptor Yan’s foul blood-ink dripped down into the stairwell.
The skin-burning black fluid hissed wildly the moment it entered the invisible heat sphere surrounding Lu Chen’s body.
At ninety point zero degrees, his resting baseline heat flash-boiled the ink into foul sulfur smoke before a single drop could touch his wolf-skin cloak.
Lu Chen paused on the landing, adjusting the iron harness across his chest.
Across his broad shoulders rested the thirty-five-pound Dragon-Severing Blood Cleaver, reforged by An Ni in the royal armory.
The heavy star-steel spine was cool to the touch. But within its hollow core, the quadruple animal fat channels hummed with dormant pressure, ready to channel six hundred degrees of heat fury at a single flick of his wrist.
