Climbing through the upper stratosphere, the familiar warmth of the mortal world peeled away, replaced by the thin, biting chill of the cosmic threshold.
Lin Xiao rocketed upward as a brilliant sapphire comet, his semi-clear jelly body humming with the refined Yang energy of the devoured solar cannon. Flanking him on either side were Gu Qingfeng, riding a gentle draft of calm sword intent that formed an invisible shield around his frayed hemp robes. Su Ling’er, whose nine snowy fox tails flared with vermilion purification flames to ward off the acid-burning spatial rough churning.
At a height of one hundred and eighty thousand feet, the sky ended.
Here, suspended between the mortal realm of the Azure Cloud and the astral planes of the Third Heaven, lay the Sky Boundary. The golden rift torn open by Envoy Bai Ming’s expeditionary fleet still yawned like a huge, ragged mouth across the purple ether. Passing through that rift felt like crossing an invisible membrane of frozen oil. Gravity inverted for a split second, the horizon vanished. The three infiltrators entered the deep sub-space void known in ancient forbidden texts as the Throat of Heaven.
It wasn’t an empty expanse of stars.
Dominating the void was a heavy-duty and cosmological monstrosity of staggering scale. Suspended across the space-folding rift was a huge pipe hub channel cast from ancient sky bronze.
