RUST AND AETHER - Edge of the Nether-Chasm
The air didn’t just grow colder a
Nether-Chasm
The air didn’t just grow colder as
Julian crested the ridge; it grew thick and acrid, tasting of turned earth, ancient ash, and something metallic that coated the back of his tongue like copper foil.Below him lay the garbage slopes.For twelve centuries, the
Order of the
Blade had dumped its refuse over the rear cliffs of
Millions of tons of waste—cinder from forged weapons, spoiled rations, broken alchemy cauldrons, night-soil, and the rotting carcasses of mountain beasts—had sloughed down the forty-five-degree incline, creating a treacherous wasteland of black slurry and shifting shale.
Nothing grew here except pale, hairless fungi and patches of toxic lichen that glowed with a faint, sickly violet hue in the dark.Julian limped through the knee-deep muck, using his broom handle as a cane.
His right calf was throbbing with a dull, sickening pulse where he’d kicked
Seth’s knee, the muscle locked so tight it felt like a steel cable under his skin.
Every time his boot sank into the soft rot of the slope, pain shot up his spine.One bad step, he thought, wiping a smear of greasy soot from his cheek, and
I slide two hundred yards into the pit.He didn’t care about the mud or the stench.
His eyes were fixed on the black horizon where the slope abruptly ended.Past the garbage fields lay the lip of the
Nether-Chasm of
Desolation.In the lore of the
Chasm was a dead zone—a ten-thousand-year-old tear in the earth that had once served as a passage for subterranean fiends during the
Entire squads of
Grandmasters had descended into its depths centuries ago to map it; none had ever returned.
Eventually, the
Sect’s founding ancestors had given up, declared the pit a forbidden zone, and turned it into the mountain’s grand dustbin.No one came here at midnight.
Not the sweepers, not the street rats, and certainly not the noble disciples from the upper inner peaks.Which made it the only place on
Ascendant where a boy with dried-up channels could find a miracle.Julian reached the edge.The ground ended in a sheer, obsidian-like precipice that dropped straight into nothingness.
There was no bottom visible—only a churning, sluggish sea of pitch-black fog that rolled against the cliff face like liquid iron.And then there was the pull.Standing within three feet of the edge,
Julian felt a strange, terrifying sensation in his marrow.
It wasn’t just wind blowing off the mountain; it was a downward suction, an unnatural gravitational tide emanating from the abyss, tugging at the hem of his tunic and pulling the cold air right out of his lungs.He dropped to his stomach, flattening his chest against a slab of cold basalt, and crept his head over the edge.”Where are you…” he muttered, squinting into the abyss.Two days ago, the original
Julian—searching for salvageable copper wire—had caught a glimpse of something down there.
A flicker of light through a rift in the black fog.Julian lay still, holding his breath, letting his eyes adjust to the churning dark below.Ten seconds.
Thirty seconds.Then the wind shifted, tearing a temporary seam through the rolling mist roughly a hundred meters down the sheer rock face.Julian’s breath hitched.There, growing out of a narrow, palm-sized granite ledge protruding from the cliff, were six tiny stalks of grass.
They didn’t look like ordinary weeds.
Their leaves were thick, shaped like curved dragon scales, and they pulsed with a slow, hypnotic crimson light that cast a soft red halo against the black stone.Dragon-Heart
Grass.Third-grade
Yang-affinity spirit herbs.In the
Order’s alchemy halls, a single stalk of
Dragon-Heart
Grass was worth at least two hundred taels of silver.
For a cultivator, its sap was liquid fire—a potent, volatile medicine capable of burning out impurities in the flesh, expanding withered meridians, and forging the raw physical baseline needed to ignite an
Seed.For someone like
Julian, whose channels were narrow and brittle, it was the only shortcut left in the world.”Six of them,” Julian whispered, his fingers digging into the basalt until his nails bled. “Six stalks.
Enough to tear these channels open or burn me to ash trying.”He pulled himself back from the edge and sat up, his heart hammering against his ribs.Getting down a hundred meters of vertical, ice-slick granite under normal conditions was suicide.
Doing it in pitch darkness, with an unnatural gravity pulling at his ankles, was madness.Julian unslung the burlap sack from his shoulder and laid out his preparations.He pulled out three lengths of frayed hemp rope scavenged from the stable yards, along with several strips of coarse linen bedsheets he’d spent the last three nights ripping and twisting into tight, double-ply cords.
He sat in the cold mud, tying the pieces together with heavy double-sheet bends, testing every knot by looping the line around his boot and pulling with his full body weight.Click.
Snap-test.His hands were bleeding from the rough fibers, but he didn’t feel it.
His brain was working with terrifying, methodical precision, calculating knot strength, rope stretch, and friction coefficients.Total length: approximately seventy meters.
Not enough to reach the ledge directly, but enough to get me into the lower mist chimney.Julian looked around for an anchor.
Ten feet from the cliff edge stood a half-buried pillar of ancient black iron—an old mooring post from some long-abandoned
It was rusted, but thick as an oak trunk and rooted deep in the mountain’s core.He looped his makeshift line around the iron post three times, secured it with a bowline, and threw the rest of the rope over the edge.The line vanished into the churning black fog.Julian stood at the brink, staring down into the dark.
The wind hissed up from the pit, carrying that bitter, ozone stench that made his skin prickle with goosebumps.No harness.
No safety clips.
No belay partner.
If a knot slips,
I don’t even get a grave.He closed his eyes for a single second.
In the dark behind his eyelids, he saw the threadbare red coat hanging on his cabin wall.
Clara’s small, shivering voice:
I’m hungry……When he opened his eyes, his dark pupils were as hard as flint.”Right,” he said softly to the void. “Let’s go down.”Julian turned his back to the abyss, gripped the coarse rope with both hands, and stepped off the mountain.The transition from solid ground to empty air was a shock that nearly ripped his fingers from the line.The moment his boots left the ledge, the
Chasm’s unnatural gravity seized him like a physical hand.
The downward pull doubled.
The rope snapped taut with a terrifying twing, the hemp groaning under the sudden, violent strain.Julian slammed sideways against the cliff face.
Pain flared through his ribs as his elbow cracked against the basalt, but he gritted his teeth, jammed the toes of his boots into a microscopic seam in the rock, and stabilized himself.Step.
Grip.He worked his way down meter by meter.The fog swallowed him within ten seconds.
Above him, the moonlight disappeared, replaced by an absolute, suffocating blackness.
The air grew colder, so frigid that his breath froze into tiny ice crystals on his eyelashes.Ten meters.
Twenty meters.His hands were numb.
The rough hemp tore through his callouses, leaving warm smears of blood on the line that made his grip slick and dangerous.
His injured right calf began to spasm, shaking uncontrollably every time he tried to find a foothold on the wet stone.Don’t look at your feet, he told himself, his knuckles white as bone around the rope.
Focus on the line.
Count the knots.Thirty meters.
Forty meters.The void-suction grew heavier.
It felt as if lead weights had been tied to his ankles, dragging him downward faster than he could feed the rope through his bleeding palms.
The wind didn’t blow sideways here; it roared straight down into the earth, howling like a dying beast in a stone tomb.Julian lowered himself another arm’s length.
His boot slipped on a patch of black ice, and for a terrifying second, he hung by his bare hands alone, his legs swinging wildly over the bottomless void.He clamped his teeth together until his jaw clicked, swung his hips, and smashed his left boot toe back into a fissure.He paused, resting his forehead against the freezing rock, his chest heaving in ragged, shallow gasps.
Sweat rolled down his nose, freezing before it dripped off his chin.Fifty meters.
I should be close.He looked down through the shifting gloom.There, just twenty meters below his boots, the crimson light of the
Dragon-Heart
Grass throbbed through the black mist.
The six scale-like leaves looked like glowing coals burning in the dark, warm and impossibly close.Julian felt a surge of fierce, cold triumph. “I see you,” he whispered.He reached down to slide his hand further along the rope—CRACK.It was a sharp, dry sound, like a dry branch snapping underfoot.Julian’s heart dropped into his stomach.Above him, fifty meters up in the dark, the makeshift line had dragged across a jagged lip of basalt once too often.
The frayed hemp strands, weakened by age and stretched beyond their limit by the
Chasm’s unnatural gravity, gave way.TSHHHK—The tension vanished instantly.Julian didn’t even have time to scream.The dark rock face shot upward before his eyes.
The wind roared in his ears like thunder, tearing the grey hood from his head as gravity reclaimed him with terrifying, absolute force.The red light of the
Dragon-Heart
Grass flashed past his vision for a fraction of a second—and then
Julian plunged headfirst into the pitch-black void of the abyss.