Chisen opened his eyes.
"It stopped," he said. "The resonance stopped.
The rock layers around the main root have all cracked.
The cracks reached the main root itself, and the root started vibrating.
Its frequency is the same as my blade's-7.3 hertz.
The main root shattered the geological structure around it through resonance.
Guy, now!"
Guy leaped.
He didn't jump down from the edge of the pit. He jumped up from its floor, then slammed back down.
He rose above the pit, turned a full three hundred and sixty degrees in midair, and concentrated all his strength in the heel of his right foot-not his fist, his heel.
Because the final blow needed hammering force, not penetration. It needed a large enough impact area to pulverize the rock layers already riddled with cracks.
His right heel traced a perfect arc through the air. Carrying the last power of the sixth gate of the Eight Gates Formation and his entire body weight, it smashed into the center of the pit floor like an enormous iron hammer.
At that instant, the ground didn't crack. It didn't collapse. It exploded.
The pit floor burst outward from the center, spraying rubble and dirt in every direction as though a controlled demolition had gone off. The shock wave pushed even Chisen back two steps.
The pit's depth instantly increased from eighty meters to over a hundred. Its floor was no longer black soil and rock-it was an entirely different color.
Dark red.
Not the red of blood, but something deeper, more opaque, closer to black. Like solidified wine, like a bloodstain that had dried long ago, like the color of something deep within the earth that should never see sunlight, something that had grown silently for thousands of years without ever being seen.
The God