Lu Chen planted both heels into the molten nickel-iron foundation of the world-size hub.
The fifty-pound Primordial Core-Shattering God Cleaver turned in his grip, its star-lead spine screaming under twelve hundred degrees of internal star-fire pressure.
He didn’t raise the blade against an enemy.
There were no enemies left in the deep pit.
The Ancient Source was dead. But its ten-thousand-year poison still festered throughout the body of the world.
Like rotting black flesh-rot trapped in the deep muscle of a dying patient, the Uncanny had seeped into every stratum, every riverbed, and every mountain root of the thirty-six provinces.
If the poison was not purged to the very last grain of corpse-salt, the world would rot in its own cold grease.
“Hold fast,” Lu Chen said.
