Deep within the deep pit, the air smelled of stone-hard marrow and cold, dead iron.
Lu Chen planted his right boot on the edge of the first step.
The dark rock slab was four feet high, nine feet wide, and black as frozen blood. It hadn’t been cut for men. Thousand years before the Great Yong raised its first mud-brick watchtower, ancient stonemasons had carved this stair into the sheer wall of the Ashen Deep gap.
Each riser needed a deliberate drop.
Each tread could hold an elephant.
Thirty miles of empty, pitch-black void yawned to Lu Chen’s left. Down in the unseen depths, underground gales groaned through jagged stone flutes, sounding like thousands of drowned soldiers weeping in their sleep.
Lu Chen paused on the terrace ledge, adjusting the strap across his chest.
On his right shoulder rested the forty-two-pound Heaven-Shattering Celestial Cleaver.
