The sound of forty-five thousand metric tons of demonic bone, rotting marrow, and shrieking soul-melted rock waste collapsing inward was not a roar.
It was a painful, metal screech, like an iron galleon being drawn into the teeth of a whirlpool.
Suspended forty feet above the snapped flat stone slabs, the Nether Blood-Fiend Avatar had folded down to two hundred feet, its massive shoulders forced down into its waist, its huge iron skull bowed forward beneath the invisible five-hundred-gravity high-pressure piston. Inside the stone-hard forehead, Crown Prince Yan Wuji’s merged demonic mind was drowning in sheer, choking panic.
The Prince felt the avatar’s internal pressure spiking toward the breaking point. The demonic bone lattice was splintering into tiny powder. The channels that carried the ancient blood were bursting one after another under the huge gravity load.
“I’ll not die like this!” Yan Wuji’s voice shrieked, tearing through the screaming minds of the one hundred thousand nether-demons. “If I can’t rule this mortal continent, then NO ONE SHALL INHABIT IT! Nether Marrow Detonation! Burn the world in blood!”
In their collective, blind terror, the tormented souls inside the avatar agreed.
Instead of fighting the downward pressure, the demonic entities reversed their spiritual rotation. They began channeling every drop of volatile soul-slurry into the central main heart artery, preparing to detonate in an offering cataclysmic star-blast!
