Steam rolled across the dry limestone basin in thick, rotten-egg billows.
Hiss—hiss—crack.
Beneath Lu Chen’s iron-shod boots, the bed of the drained oasis groaned as heat contraction tore through the hardened stone.
An hour earlier, the turquoise pool had been fifty paces of stale, negative-eighty-degree spirit-bile, home to the underground Nether-Devouring Toad.
Now, the bile was gone.
Lu Chen’s three-hundred-degree Thermal Stomp had flash-boiled three thousand barrels of toxic chill into the scorching desert sky. That left only a crusted crater of baked stone salts and cracked bedrock.
Lu Chen stood motionless at the crater’s lip.
On his right shoulder, the thirty-five-pound Dragon-Severing Blood Cleaver rested quietly, its cord-wrapped grip warm against his calloused palm.
