For eight thousand steps, the ascent through the upper tiers had felt like a relentless physical climb against gravity. But Team Vanguard pushed open the sky bronze doors of Floor 90. Then, they discovered that gravity had ceased to be an ally.
In fact, the very concept of the earth had been fully erased.
The five companions stopped dead at the threshold, their boots hovering inches above a deep pit so vast, so terrifyingly bottomless, that all five instinctively pulled backward. They pressed their backs against the door frame.
There was no floor.
There were no walls of polished dark rock, no arched ceilings, no stone pathways. Before them stretched an infinite upright deep gap spanning hundreds of square leagues of open sky, lit up by the twin moons and swirling bands of auroral violet and sky gold. Far below. There, the ground ought to have been, stretched an endless ocean of churning storm clouds. Far above hung a canopy of crackling starlight and spiraling lightning funnels.
Suspended within this roaring upright void, held in place by fine, detailed glowing spatial formations, were twelve huge dark rock pillars. Each pillar was roughly thirty paces wide, snapped flat at the top like lonely stone stands floating adrift in a hurricane. Between the pillars roared a storm of staggering ferocity. Howling gale shears where wind velocities exceeded four hundred and eighty li per hour, twisting and shearing through the air in violent, invisible heat vortexes.
