At eight in the morning, Arthur Vance started Phase One of the world-size leyline exact timing.
Arthur stood at the control stone stand of the Continental Core Gate. He raised his hands, his neural bandwidth expanding to four thousand eight hundred units. Through the high-capacity tracking data links, he established direct neural contact with the two main channels already running in the Pacific lithosphere: Vault 4, the Celestial Wind-Tiger Vault, and Vault 5, the Azure Leviathan Well.
“Phase One: Dual Deep hum,” Arthur commanded through the link. “Vesper, channel the Gengjin Western Metal channel! Echo, channel the Wood-Water Eastern channel!”
Vesper stepped onto the western white-gold basin.
The Starry Slaughter White Tiger didn’t hesitate. She placed both front paws firmly into the center of the white-gold socket. Her razor-thin claws extended to make direct contact with the zero-pushback starmetal channels.
SHUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUM.
A blinding pillar of pure, blazing bright white light erupted from Vesper’s paws, shooting straight down into the sub-mantle fault. Her white-gold coat flared with brilliant soft glow, the hairline black spatial fractures along her stripes expanding into stable space-folding channels.
Through her bloodline, Vesper connected directly with the old family Gengjin core of Vault 4, forty miles to the northwest. The world-size leylines running beneath the western Pacific shook with crisp, metal perfection, shearing away hundreds of years of piled up earth-shaking friction.
