The descent into the mountain’s deepest roots went five thousand feet straight down through solid black basalt.
Gu Changsheng stood at the front of the octagonal brass cargo lift as it glided smoothly down the vertical mining shaft beneath the old ancestral hall. Beside him stood his four children, one-eyed Grandpa Fu clutching his spiritual jade abacus. Head Janitor Jian Chen—who was proudly wearing his new royal-blue overalls and neon-yellow safety vest while holding a bronze spirit lantern to light the way.
As the brass platform descended past the three-thousand-foot mark, the air grew noticeably strange.
Instead of getting hotter from the natural geothermal magma of the deep crust, the air in the shaft turned bitingly cold. Carrying a metallic, ozone-heavy chill that smelled of deep outer space and dried rust. Frost crystals began to bloom along the iron guide-rails, only to melt away the instant Gu Changsheng’s warm golden Hearth-Fire aura brushed past them.
“We are at the bottom, Principal Gu,” Head Janitor Jian Chen whispered respectfully as the brass platform settled onto a vast, underground plaza carved out of glassy black volcanic stone.
Ahead of them rose the Forbidden Underground Shrine.
Its hundred-foot walls were built from seamless slabs of blood-veined star-granite that had sat undisturbed in the dark for three millennia.
