The blood-jade core was thirty feet beneath the boiling lake bed.
To reach it, any physical projectile or spiritual spell had to punch through forty feet of white-hot blood-acid. It was followed by thirty feet of tightly packed, ancient dark rock bedrock.
Even Meng Shan’s five-hundred-pound iron slab-shield, dropped from the cave roof, would barely chip the top six inches of that dark rock shelf.
And the working clock was running out of ticks.
Across the boiling surface of the lake, the thirty-foot skull cooking pot was glowing with deep, cherry-red incandescence. The demonic blood-oil was heating past four hundred degrees. Its thickness dropped toward that of water as the Nine-Rot Matrix approached ninety-five percent saturation.
When it hit one hundred percent, the backing-up pressure valves would seal. It locked the injection loop permanently into the Great Iron Vein.
“We can’t dig through thirty feet of stone,” Meng Shan grunted, his shoulder braced against the null-deep ring dome. “Even with air-powered mining drills, cutting that dark rock shelf takes forty hours.”
“We aren’t cutting it,” Lin Ke said. “We’re shattering it via sound bubbling blast.”
