Seven seconds remained when the Primordial Stem-Marrow made contact with the core’s man-made genome.
The reaction was instant, violent, and total.
The uncorrupted marrow of Earth’s true pre-Cataclysm sovereigns carried a living hum that was fundamentally incompatible with Splicer rotting corruption. Where the golden-violet fluid touched the black-ice biomass, the cellular walls didn’t merely rupture. Their man-made genetic strands unraveled like dry twine exposed to an open flame.
A brilliant network of golden veins exploded outward from the injection site, racing through the titan’s four-hundred-thousand-ton body at faster-than-sound speed.
Every mutated blood-vessel tube, every stolen whale vertebra. Every fused star-iron girder began to glow with blinding, prismatic soft glow. The rotting slush that had circulated through the beast for one hundred and forty-two years was systematically purged, its atom-deep bonds broken down into baseline elemental minerals. The hundreds of years of piled up living suffering were dissolved in a tidal wave of ancient cellular rebirth.
“Pip! Deliver the spark!” Arthur roared, throwing himself backward off the collapsing chest platform.
From the cave ceiling, Pip folded his wings and entered his end-post dive.
The divine raptor fell like a falling star, reaching Mach 3.5 in the thin polar air. A nonstop sonic boom echoed through the lightless vault as Pip dropped directly toward the exposed drain needle still embedded in the titan’s chest. At the final split second, Pip ignited every ounce of solar mana within his golden feathers, concentrating six thousand degrees of pure solar star-fire into a single, needle-thin…
