The air at the threshold of the Inner Gate smelled of boiled bronze, dead stars, and curdled marrow.
Twenty miles below the land-wide crust, the bedrock was no longer stone.
It was glass-fused mantle: black, glassy black glass shot through with blazing bright veins of liquid world-size iron.
Every six heartbeats, the floor shivered.
A low-hum pulse rang upward from the deep, shaking loose flakes of crystal-hardened sulfur from the jagged ceiling five hundred paces above.
Lu Chen came to a halt on the edge of the fracture.
His iron-soled boots ground into the glassy stone with a sharp, dry screech.
In his right hand, the fifty-pound Primordial Core-Shattering God Cleaver hung motionless.
