The eastern arches of the Reincarnation Gates smelled of ozone and scorched rabbit-hair.
Shen Yue knelt upon the black dark rock flat stone slabs sixty feet above the wipe-out deep pit. Her fingers shook wildly as she dipped her four floating brushes into the shallow dregs of her inkpots.
Her high-thickness spirit-red stone was eighty percent empty.
Her lead-infused soot was down to a fingernail’s depth.
Worse, the four concurrent threads of her divided soul intent—held in parallel execution for nearly four hours—were beginning to de-synchronize. Tiny race conditions were rippling across her mind. That made her left eye twitch with sharp, blinding migraine spasms as her internal safety lock locks began to slip.
Before her, advancing across the grand raised stone road, was an elite Netherworld strike finger bone. Three hundred armored spectral guards clad in black mirror-steel. They swung eight-foot poleaxes that crackled with rotting frost.
Their objective was clear. Retake the Reincarnation Gates and seal the intake valves before the River of Forgetfulness could breach the outer edge.
“Hold the threshold,” Shen Yue whispered, her teeth biting into her lower lip until blood mingled with the soot on her chin. “Hold the line.”
