The gravity vortex at mile one hundred and seventy was known in the ancient navigational charts of the Jiuzhou Plane as the Maw of the Starless Deep.
It was a swirling, funnel-shaped tear in the underground void, three hundred yards wide, where gravity twisted inward at forty thousand turns a minute.
Caught directly in the swirling throat of this deep-sea whirlpool was the pride of the Zhang Sage Clan. The one-hundred-ton astral warship Solar Dominance. The ship’s massive silver-plated hull groaned under fifty thousand tons of twisting shear.
SKRRRRRR-CRUNCH.
Load-bearing beams of five-hundred-year-old hardwood cracked inside the lower decks. Two of the three soaring mainmasts had snapped at the crosstrees, their silver-woven sails shredded into glittering ribbons by violent outward-pulling winds.
“Hold the rope winch!” chief helmsman Wu shouted. It spat blood as the canted deck tilted forty-five degrees toward the black deep pit. “The keel is buckling! We’re losing the spirit drive!”
Down on the forward deck, Young Master Zhang Wuheng clung to a bronze mooring cleat with both arms, his stitched silk robes soaked in black spirit oil and bilge water. The healing bandages wrapped around his forehead had been ripped away by the gale, revealing his bruised face.
