Twenty miles straight down beneath the northernmost ice shelf of the Northern Ice Wastes, the air inside Geothermal Shaft #1 was dead silent.
Ten minutes ago, five thousand thirty-foot Frost-Giants and Ye Guhan’s Sword-Trench Team had been laughing and singing as they dug this vertical shaft toward the northern mantle to tap a new magma vein for North-Polar City.
Right now, nobody was singing.
All five thousand Frost-Giants had retreated to the upper ledges of the wide underground cavern, blowing on their hands even through their Earth-Lightening Grip Gloves, while Pei Xuan, Old Wei, Ye Guhan, Ao Ming, and King Gu Shan stood on a floating jade platform at the very bottom of the twenty-mile pit.
“Look down there, Lord Pei,” King Gu Shan whispered, pointing a trembling giant finger at the cavern floor. “Right when my shovel hit twenty miles deep, the granite disappeared—and we scraped against that.”
Stretching across the bottom of the deep cavern was what looked like a colossal tree root—except it wasn’t made of wood, and it wasn’t made of stone.
It was a hundred-foot-thick cylinder of eerie Purple-Black Metal, covered in millions of tiny, pulsing, worm-like runes that didn’t belong to any script known on Planet Canglan!
