The hum within the Crystal Genesis Throne shifted from a high-pitched turbine whine to a deep, sub-heard shaking that rang directly in the marrow of Arthur’s bones.
Underneath the soles of his boots, the semi-clear floor of the core chamber turned into a living blueprint of the planet. Seven radiant channels of golden light branched outward from the central quartz pillar, cutting through the deep-sea dark of the hollow inside like burning cables. Each channel tracked along an ancient earth-shaking fault line, racing upward through thousands of miles of dense mantle toward the surface crust.
Arthur adjusted the focus dial on his monocle magnifying glass. His tactical display flickered, switching from local biochemical diagnostics to world-size-scale deep ring tracking data.
To a frontline beast-doctor surgeon, the view was right away familiar. He didn’t see mystical geography or esoteric magic. He saw a huge living organism undergoing massive blood-vessel pressure drop. The earth-shaking plates were the skeletal scaffold. The molten mantle was the circulating dark-blood supply. And the ancient crystal-clear leylines formed the automatic nervous system. For one hundred million years, this world-size anatomy had been suffocated under a series of crushing tourniquets.
“Grimm, lean into the eastern dampener,” Arthur ordered, his voice crisp and clear over the mounting hum of the awakening machinery. “The Tartarus channel is drawing twenty percent more moving load than the models predicted. If the feedback loop spikes, it will blow the dark rock regulators and trigger an untuned earth-shaking tremor.”
