The yawning six-sided portal of the main drainage sump was a thirty-foot vortex of rushing darkness.
The freezing air rushing into the deep gap tasted of ancient granite dust and underground frost. It roared with the fury of an open mountain pass in winter. The draft pulling toward the three-league drainage portal was an ear-splitting, underground hurricane of cold air, rushing downward into the deep fractures of the land-wide crust. Far below, in the total blackness of the earth-shaking fault, the distant roar of magma rivers hissed with a terrifying, low, deep rumble that set the teeth on edge. The rim of the portal was polished smooth by hundreds of years of rushing water, slick as oiled glass and devoid of handholds.
Below that opening lay the true deep pit—the three-league upright drainage deep gap through which the mountain’s excess groundwater was discharged into the underground earth-shaking fault lines beneath the land-wide crust.
Elder Qian tumbled through the empty air, his body spinning helplessly as the moving driving force from Tie Shan’s six-pound wedge drove him over the threshold of the portal.
The water spheres around the opening began to elongate, pulled by the massive sky draft into tear-drop-shaped streamers of sapphire light that came together toward the dark shaft.
