The walk across the Abyssal Starlight Causeway was remarkably peaceful.
For a thousand yards, the white jade flat stone slabs remained cool and smooth beneath their boots. It was flanked on either side by the gentle, glowing silver waves of the underground starlight sea. Semi-clear silver manta rays banked beneath the arching bridge in slow, timed together sweeps. Their eerie-glowing wings cast ripples of violet-silver light that sparkled against the ancient jade stone railings.
At the far end of the raised stone road, the gentle beauty of the glowing lake gave way to overwhelming stone-built majesty.
Carved directly into the sheer face of a titanic black glass cliff wall stood the megalithic gatehouse. The portal rose sixty meters into the vaulted cave ceiling, supported by massive stone lintels of polished black granite that seemed thick enough to hold up the weight of the sky. The doors themselves were a pair of massive slabs cast from ancient sea-green bronze, fully unmarred by rusting, oxidization, or pitting despite hundreds of thousands of years of underground solitude.
“Look at the alloy,” Tie Shan breathed, his iron-furred chest expanding as he stopped at the foot of the massive threshold. He lowered his 500-jin hammer gently onto the white jade landing with a soft clink. He reached out a trembling, calloused paw to touch the bronze surface. “It isn’t ordinary mountain bronze, Lord Xiao. It’s blended with cold-iron marrow and void-gold. The ancients didn’t just cast these doors. They folded the metal hundreds of times…
