By the time they reached the outside level corresponding to Floor Thirty, three hundred feet above the mountain volcano bowl, the silent empty pocket of the lower void began to tear open.
They had crossed the outside sky boundary layer.
The Hundred-Floor Demon Trial Pagoda was not fully sealed from the mountain’s natural weather on its upper tiers. While the inside trial chambers remained hermetically isolated, the outside hull projected into the howling alpine gales that swept across the peaks of the Demon Cloud range.
A sudden, violent crosswind roared out of the southern clouds. It struck the unrendered wireframe at sixty-five knots.
The wind was bitterly cold, dropping the effective wind chill to minus eighteen degrees. It carried fine, razor-sharp needles of frozen ice fog that stung Lin Tao’s cheeks and whipped his heavy woolen cloak like the sail of a floundering junk. More dangerously, the invisible crash ramp, which had been three paces wide on the lower tiers, began to narrow sharply as the pagoda’s stone-built profile narrowed inward.
At Floor Thirty-Two, the invisible ledge was barely twenty-four inches wide.
A sudden heat gust struck Lin Tao’s left shoulder. He knocked his balance point two inches beyond the edge of the invisible ledge.
