The sludge didn’t smell of death. It smelled of static and rotten copper.
It rose from the infinite deep pit like boiling crude oil. It spat bubbles of black foam three feet wide that popped with high-pitched sound shrieks. Each pop released a puff of packed karmic heat wave that made Lin Ke’s teeth ache and sent cold, nauseating tremors rippling through his Glass Spirit veins.
Beneath his boots, the three-mile-wide brass cogwheel of the Primordial Samsara Dais groaned.
The teeth of the huge gear—each tooth the size of a three-story pagoda—were choked with thick, greasy ribbons of stone-hard spiritual memory. Old family grudges, unfulfilled deathbed oaths, and fragmented mortal identities had congealed into a tar-like substance that jammed the ancient clockwork.
Every six seconds, a violent ground-shaking shudder tore through the platform as the clockwork drive train tried to turn and failed.
Zhao Wuji fell to his hands and knees on the brass deck, clutching his stomach and dry-heaving wildly. “The air... It feels like someone is scrubbing my mind with sand.”
“Karmic heat wave,” Lin Ke said, his boots crunching over dried brass scale as he approached the edge of the Dais.
He looked down.
