The heavy star-iron gates of the 9th Ring Vault Elevator parted with a low, metallic groan, and a wall of minus-four-hundred-degree cosmic frost rolled into the lift shaft like liquid nitrogen.
Ahead of the [Trojan Nine-Grid Hotpot Cart] stretched the final underground approach to the Abyssal Frost Vault—a three-hundred-foot bridge of jagged black star-ice suspended over a bottomless crevasse of howling astral wind. At the far end of the bridge towered a hundred-foot door forged from unyielding divine star-steel, engraved with the personal judicial seal of Warden Tianfa.
And coiled directly across the steps of that hundred-foot door was the apex biological deterrent of Sector 6: a pair of ancient Nine-Headed Rank 8 Abyssal Ice-Drakes.
Each drake was the size of a three-story fortress, covered in overlapping plates of dark-blue diamond scales that could shrug off planetary laser cannons. Eighteen long, serpentine necks writhed through the sub-zero mist, each crowned with a horned skull and jaws lined with three rows of soul-freezing crystal fangs.
Thick chains of star-adamant linked their iron collars to the vault pillars, though the chains had enough slack for the beasts to sweep the entire bridge in half a breath.
“Careful, Dad!” thirteen-year-old Ye Xiao whispered through the brass voice-tube from the living room inside the cart, his spectacles reflecting the blue glow of the drakes’ scales as he checked [Dad’s Plot-Spoiler Notebook] reference notes.
