The grease on the main lift cables squealed like a dying pig as the iron cage plunged into the dark.
Lin Ke stood at the front of the rattling platform, his fingers wrapped around the cold, rusted outer edge bars. Beside him, Meng Shan held his massive slab-shield wedged against the cage floor to dampen the clockwork shaking, his breath coming in slow, measured puffs of white mist.
Behind them, packed shoulder-to-shoulder, were Shen Yue and twenty conscripted laborers. Including eight scared hired blades from the Grand Fortune Trade ring, their stitched silks now covered in soot and axle grease.
The descent was brutal.
At one hundred paces down, the surrounding heat spiked ten degrees. The air, normally cool and smelling of damp shale, began to curdle.
By two hundred paces, the stench was choking.
It smelled of boiled copper, rotting sheep offal, and white-hot sulfur. Through the iron grating of the cage, the natural granite walls of the shaft were no longer visible.
The rock was fully coated in a thick, pulsating crimson slime—a leech-like bio-membrane grown from demonic blood-fungus. Thick, vein-like cords as thick as a man’s thigh crawled along the lift guides, throbbing with a sickening, rhythmic pulse that matched the distant shaking of the underground steam vents.
