A wall of white steam roared across the floor of the underground deep pit.
Lu Chen drove his iron-soled boots into the boiling bedrock, his stride eating thirty paces with every clockwork heave of his thighs.
Beneath the soles of his boots, the lake of condensed spirit-water churned at a violent, rolling boil of one hundred degrees.
The scalding steam parted before his chest like white silk split by a hot iron plow.
Five hundred paces ahead, the Netherworld Gates rose five hundred feet into the underground gloom.
The giant stone portals, carved from stone-hard dragon ribs and huge slabs of black nether-ice, groaned upon ancient hinges that had not turned in ten thousand years.
Grafted directly into the threshold of the gates stood Nether-Emperor Yanluo.
The entity was thirty feet of stone-hard titan muscle and frozen malice, anchored to the underground core by thick pillars of black frost.
