If the first fifty floors of the Thousand-Floor Celestial Pagoda tested a fighter’s technique. The next forty floors tested their endurance and elemental understanding, the nineties tested something far more elusive: the total limit of the human spirit.
Between Floor 91 and Floor 98, the biomes ceased to look like ordinary physical landscapes.
On Floor 92, the party had to navigate the Hall of Inverted Mirrors, where phantom duplicates copied every sword technique and spell at double the casting speed. That forced Han Xue to invent formless, improvisational swordplay on the fly. On Floor 94, the Bridge of Temporal Sighs subjected their physical bodies to shifting gravity fields that alternated between tenfold squeezing and total weightlessness every six seconds.
Then came Floor 96: The Abyssal Gravity Vortex.
A huge, swirling vortex of dark gravity force opened in the center of the dark rock hall. It pulled everything toward a crushing star-core. As the vortex swelled, threatening to suck the entire formation into its crushing center, Liu Tao’s feet began to slide.
His quiver was down to its final three arrows. His spiritual core was flickering like a dying candle in a winter gale.
“Go!” Liu Tao shouted over the roaring gravity storm. He dropped his bow, slammed his knees into the stone. Then he grasped the anchoring bracket of the floor array with both hands.
