The heat streaming from the cave floor felt like an open fire door.
Lin Ke stood at the edge of the limestone ledge. He looked out over an underground deep pit that defied every concept of human sanity. The cave spanned half a mile in width, its vaulted dark rock ceiling lost in thick, roiling billows of greasy red vapor.
Below them lay the Lake of Corrupted Blood.
It wasn’t stale fluid. The surface boiled with massive, sluggish bubbles that burst with wet, sickening pops, releasing plumes of rotten-egg steam and boiled away copper.
Suspended sixty feet above the boiling surface by heavy iron chains were more than thirty iron cages.
Inside the cages, packed together like cattle, were over a hundred captured miners and Azure Cloud outer students. Thick, see-through drain tube tubes—made from the dried intestines of deep-sea drakes—hung from the bottoms of the cages, driven straight into the captive fighters’ main thigh blood vessels.
Every heartbeat pumped a thin, steady trickle of bright red life essence down into the boiling lake below, feeding the central array node.
In the dead center of the lake stood the Nine-Rot Stagnation Matrix.
