Climbing an invisible ladder in a sixty-knot gale was an exercise in pure body discipline.
Every eighteen inches of upward progress demanded four distinct clockwork checks. Right hand grip, left foot placement, left hand grip, right foot placement. The rungs were invisible to normal sight. Because of that, Lin Tao had to rely entirely on the tactile feedback of his frozen leather gloves and the faint gold wireframe vectors projected by his left optic sensor.
At Floor Forty-Eight, five hundred feet above the volcano bowl floor, they climbed past the see-through outside wall of the Arena of the Ashen Gorgons.
Lin Tao paused on the ladder, hooking his right elbow through an invisible rung to rest his burning forearm extensors. He looked through the one-way see-through wall into the chamber thirty feet away.
The arena of Floor Fifty was a huge tiered arena of dark green jade, littered with the shattered stone statues of former trial participants. In the center of the hall, locked in a desperate, blood-soaked battle, was a prodigy Lin Tao recognized. Senior Brother Lu of the Heavenly Sword Sect, widely heralded as the greatest sword talent of the southern provinces.
Lu’s stitched white robes were torn to shreds, soaked in his own blood. He was wielding a pair of star-steel dress swords that flared with blinding azure sword-light, blocking the furious strikes of a man-made three-headed Ashen Gorgon whose serpent tails whipped across the floor with the force of giant crossbow bolts.
