The underground bedrock didn’t merely crack. It split open like the crust of an overbaked loaf of bread.
Across the five-mile floor of the Underground Akashic Archives, the first hairline fissure groaned, shuddered. Then he wildly tore outward toward the distant horizon.
Within sixty seconds, the gap widened from ten yards to one hundred yards.
Then to a mile.
Then to a huge, ten-mile-wide deep-sea deep gap that swallowed half the cave floor and cut the southern foundation wooden support posts of Mount Apex!
The bottom of the deep gap was invisible to mortal eyes. It plunged straight down through the lithosphere, straight through the mantle boundary. It ended in the swirling, molten sea of the world-size core twelve thousand meters below the surface.
From the depths of the rift, a sound like a thousand jet engines roared upward.
It was a natural sky chimney draft of world-ending proportions.
