Freezing subterranean air rushed out of the private lift shaft as the heavy cage descended three hundred meters beneath the granite bed of Lake Geneva.
When the bronze grate slid open at Sub-Level 9, a damp, metallic stench of stagnant lake silt and old blood-incense rolled into the cabin.
Lin Mo stepped out onto the frost-covered obsidian tiles, his dark coat sweeping past rows of extinguished bronze wall lamps. Right beside him walked six-year-old Little Guo’er, clutching her small red porcelain alchemy mortar in one hand and holding Sister Clara’s warm fingers with the other.
Behind them followed Lukas, Tang Xiaomi, Chu Lingxiao, and Tie Niu—who was dragging Baron Victor Julian von Lombard-Vane by the back of his silver-embroidered cape like a sack of wet turnips.
“Ugh, the feng-shui down here is rotten to the core!” nineteen-year-old talisman prodigy Tang Xiaomi said, wrinkling her nose as she flipped open her dual-screen jade radar compass. Her ninety-six-point golden halo flared as she projected a green diagnostic grid across the vaulted subterranean cavern.
At the center of the cavern stood a circular altar carved from black Alpine basalt, surrounded by twelve pulsing pillars of crimson glass. Inside each glass pillar swirled murky red mist connected to hundreds of hair-thin bronze spirit-conduits that snaked up through the ceiling toward the surface of Geneva and the surrounding Alpine valleys.
