Between Floor Seventy-Five and Floor Eighty-Five, the Hundred-Floor Demon Trial Pagoda ceased to be a testing arena for mortal fighters.
It had become a heavy-duty slaughterhouse.
Lin Tao and Tie Shan walked along the narrow outside wireframe rim eight hundred and twenty feet above the frozen volcano bowl floor. The wind here had settled into a thin, biting smooth-flowing slipstream that hissed against their wool trousers with the high-pitched whistle of escaping steam. To their right, the see-through, unrendered outside walls offered a clear view into the high-tier testing chambers where the Precursor master builders had packed their most terrifying combat simulations.
At Floor Eighty, they paused to peer through the invisible boundary.
The inside of Floor Eighty was an inverted sphere of polished black glass, three hundred feet in width. There, the gravity vector rotated continuously around the central axis. Clinging to the walls were twelve bio-clockwork Centipedes of the Deep pit. Monstrous automatons forty feet in length, forged of segmented diamond back shells and armed with high-pressure pincer jaws that chewed through solid granite like dry bread.
In the center of the sphere, a trio of skeletal Core Formation elders from the Heavenly River Trade ring were suspended in mid-air, trapped by opposing gravity fields. As the two men watched, a deep-sea centipede lunged from the ceiling, its diamond jaws snapping closed with bone-shaking, bone-crushing force that sliced through an elder’s golden spiritual barrier in less than a heartbeat.
