CRACK-BOOM!
Fifty miles straight down beneath the central courtyard of Dry-Well City, the air inside the Planetary Core Chamber was thick enough to chew.
A sluggish, half-frozen ocean of golden magma stretched out as far as the eye could see. Instead of bubbling with healthy planetary fire, the golden lava was crusted over with patches of sickly purple-black frost. And rising right out of the center of that dying magma sea was a monstrous ten-mile-tall pillar of black bone and purple star-iron—the Planetary Spirit-Draining Nail.
Thousands of pulsing blood-colored chains were wrapped around the giant Nail like bloated leeches. With every slow thump-thump of the planet’s heart, those chains sucked thick streams of golden World-Origin Qi out of the magma and shot them upward through a hidden spatial beam inside the Nail’s shaft.
Standing at the edge of the Dry-Well Abyssal Elevator platform, Pei Xuan adjusted his town mayor’s robe and squinted up at the ten-mile pillar.
Even with his Rank 6 Peak Furnace-Gold Core spinning warmly inside his dantian, the foul stench coming off those blood-chains made his nose wrinkle. It smelled like ten thousand years of rusty iron, rotten swamp mud, and unpaid taxes.
“Look at the size of that illegal pipe,” Pei Xuan muttered, tapping the black-iron brick hanging from his waist belt. “No wonder my Sweet-Spring Well only gave three buckets of yellow mud on Day One. Somebody stuck a ten-mile straw right under my backyard and drank the whole planet dry!”
