The stairway between the Third and Fourth Gates was different from the previous two transitions.
The First to Second had been the pressure of a higher-tier environment against the cultivation base generally. The Second to Third had been the same pressure directed specifically against the Law. The Third to Fourth was neither of those things.
It was quiet.
Not the quiet of an environment producing no sound. The quiet of an environment in which sound existed but had been organized into something other than noise, the mountain's structural resonance at this altitude carrying the pulse in a register that was closer to tone than to rhythm, a single sustained note rather than a repeated beat.
He climbed through it.
The tone was not pleasant or unpleasant. It was present. It pressed against something in the framework that the previous transitions had not pressed against, something he identified after the third minute of climbing as his attention.
