The deep-rock crust beneath the Grand Coliseum didn’t merely crack. It dissolved into a boiling, churning lake of dark, putrid gore.
Two hundred years ago, when the First Emperor’s stonemasons laid the coliseum’s foundations, they had cut corners on the underground drainage channels. They laid unsealed solid mountain stone directly over the dormant fiery faults of the Jiuzhou plate. For two hundred years, unvented heat bubbling blast, stale water drops, and spiritual runoff had festered in the underground dark. Now, every single neglected joint and porous mortar line surrendered fully to the demonic marrow Crown Prince Yan Wuji had pumped into the earth.
From the shattered flat stone slabs surrounding the ancient bone altar, hundreds of underground blood geysers erupted forty feet into the air. It hissed wildly as they contacted the dry iron-hard metal dust. The air filled with the thick, choking stench of copper, rotting marrow, and sulfur.
ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAR!
The sound was not living. It was the timed together, painful wail of one hundred thousand tormented nether-souls shrieking through a throat of churning blood and tightly packed rotting essence!
Rising from the fiery fissure in the center of the pitch was a towering, three-hundred-foot nightmare.
The Tier-6 Nether Blood-Fiend Avatar.
