WHIRRRRRRRRR—CLANG!
Dropping straight down through the circular hull breach that Ye Guhan had neatly shaved into fifty thousand Star-Steel manhole covers, the Dry-Well Abyssal Elevator & Super-Drill plunged past the thirty-two-mile mark into the final, deepest layer of Planet Canglan’s crust.
Thirty-five miles... forty miles... forty-five miles!
As the hundred-foot-wide cylinder bored through the lower mantle rock at five miles an hour, the atmosphere inside the shaft grew heavier with every passing minute.
Outside the heat-proof crystal windows, the rock wasn’t ordinary black basalt anymore. It was dense, heavy Planetary Core-Iron shot through with glowing golden veins—the living blood vessels of the planet itself!
Yet every few hundred feet, the team saw thick, ugly roots of purple-black bone and cursed star-iron dug deep into those golden veins like giant leeches. Through the translucent walls of the purple-black roots, they could actually see rivers of liquid golden World-Origin Qi being sucked away from the rock and pulled inward toward the central fifty-mile chamber!
Every time a golden vein had its Qi sucked out, a layer of eerie, unnatural Purple-Black Frost spread across the rock, freezing the warm earth-marrow solid.
“Look at that frost on the golden veins!” Frost-Giant King Gu Shan growled, pressing his huge hand against the cargo deck window. “That’s the exact same black ice that crept up under our Northern Ice Wastes and froze our fire-pits! The core of the planet isn’t cooling down because it’s old—it’s freezing because that giant Nail is drinking all its warm blood!”
