Where the light of the mortal realm died forever, the descent through the Ashen Deep gap came to an end.
For two days, the giant stone dark rock stairway had wound downward through thirty miles of shattered underground strata.
Now, the final step met the deep-sea floor.
Clink.
Lu Chen’s iron-soled boots struck the bedrock.
The stone beneath his soles was not ordinary granite. It was black frozen ground dark rock, tightly packed under the weight of earth-shaking plates and soaked with thousands of years of crystal-hardened Nether-ice.
The surrounding air was thin, tasting of sulfuric acid, stone-hard bone meal, and ancient corpse-oil.
A heavy northern draft breathed across the expanse. It dropped the surrounding heat to forty-eight point five degrees below zero.
