Arthur tapped the central screen of the Master First-born End-post. He walked into the main test query: World-size System Status.
The star-iron pillar flared with deep indigo soft glow.
Above the dais, the scattered historical logs and stone-built schematics dissolved, coalescing into a huge, three-space-folding light-projected sphere forty paces in width. It was a complete, real-time deep-rock projection of planet Earth, rotating smoothly upon an invisible axis.
Arthur and his squad stepped back, looking up at the tiny world in stunned silence.
The light-projected globe was not merely a body map of oceans and continents. It displayed the planet’s living blood-flow system. Veins of brilliant azure, emerald, and crimson light coursed through the mantle. It wrapped around the molten core like the blood vessels of a huge sky organism.
“Comparative anatomy,” Arthur whispered, his surgeon’s instincts identifying the load-bearing pattern in a single glance. “This isn’t random geology. The Earth possesses a blood-vessel system. A network of world-size spirit veins.”
Along the glowing spirit vein pathways, seven massive nodal points were marked with fine, detailed sovereign sigils.
Arthur studied the spreading of the seven nodes. They were situated at precise earth-shaking map points: the deep polar trenches, the deep-sea crust-sink zones, the oceanic trenches, and the roots of land-wide cratons. To an untrained modern geologist, these locations were merely the deepest fracture zones on the crust. But through the test lens of the pre-Cataclysm Sovereigns, they were acupuncture points.
