The black glass pinnacle jutting over the deep pit was knife-edge sharp, polished smooth by thousands of years of rushing river torrents before the Great Leyline Drought had stripped it bare.
Sword Saint Gu Qingfeng stood atop the narrow stone spire, his patched green robes whipping wildly in the white-hot sulfur gale. Below his cloth shoes, the black canyon plunged into a swirling fog of yellow steam and blazing bright ruby embers. The heat streaming from the deep gap was intense enough to melt lead. But Gu Qingfeng stood motionless as an ancient cedar rooted in mountain snow.
The wandering swordmaster uncorked his chipped wine gourd, took a solitary swallow of plum wine. Then he closed his eyes.
He didn’t draw his sword. Instead, from the center of his forehead, a thread of pure, semi-clear sword intent—finer than a strand of spider silk and cold as winter dew—extended downward into the deep pit.
It was the divine sense of a Soul Formation grandmaster, sharpened through three hundred years of wandering through the wild leylines of the world.
The gossamer thread of sword intent plunged through the shrieking steam vents, slicing cleanly through three thousand meters of fractured dark rock strata, earth-shaking fault lines, and underground lava tubes. Down, down it spiraled, sinking into the deep world-size crust where the heat surpassed twelve hundred degrees of molten fire and rock ceased to be solid stone, becoming a churning, thick, sticky sea of liquid earth-blood.
