The air that rose from the bronze hatch tasted of dead stars, copper oxide, and three hundred years of stale cold air.
It carried none of the sulfur stink of the smelting pits above, nor the damp mold of the limestone caves. It was bone-dry, cold as deep void, and humming with a faint, low-hum sound shaking that shook through the marrow of Lin Ke’s teeth.
Lin Ke took the lead on the spiral iron stairs.
His newly steadied 8th-Layer Glass Spirit veins acted as sensitive antenna arrays. It caught the strange, uniform magnetic currents leaking from the smooth, machine-dressed dark rock walls. These were not natural caverns carved by water, nor the crude, pick-axed tunnels of sect miners.
Every block of stone was squared to the tiny fraction of an inch, fused without mortar, and etched with micro-grooves that carried dead, unpowered copper channels.
Fifty feet down. A hundred feet.
The stairs ended on a wide, suspended watching overhead frame made of dark, rustless iron.
Before them opened Sub-Vault Zero.
