The high-pitched hum shaking through the bedrock was the sound of an unthrottled reactor heading toward critical mass.
The thirty-foot skull cooking pot in the center of the lake was no longer just glowing red. The black meteor iron was turning semi-clear white, its outer load-bearing rivets beginning to cry droplets of molten metal that hissed into the boiling blood below.
Inside the cooking pot, three thousand gallons of demonic blood-oil and packed spirit marrow were trapped under four crushing deep-sea pressure of earth-heat pressure.
The reaction was exponential.
Every second the magma pumped into the base, the heat climbed by forty degrees. The heat energy breached twelve hundred degrees. Then, the hydrocarbon chains in the blood-oil would crack into volatile spiritual gas.
The resulting explosion wouldn’t just breach the cave.
It would turn to steam the lower foundations of Black Rock Citadel, collapse the entire Iron Sword mountain pass, and poison eighty miles of agricultural lowlands with a plume of radioactive, rotting fallout.
“Evacuate the miners!” Meng Shan roared, turning toward the mid-air winches holding the thirty cages.
