Sitting comfortably in the ancient green velvet reading chair, Lin Xiao stretched his arms, rolled his shoulders. Then he smiled at his companions.
“All right, everyone,” Lin Xiao said, his voice easy and light. “Stand back a few paces. It’s time to do some speed reading.”
Before Gu Qingfeng or Tie Shan could ask what he meant by ‘speed reading,’ Lin Xiao let go of his human form. With a soft, musical shhk, his physical body dissolved into a puddle of semi-clear sapphire fluid that splashed gently onto the gray flat stone slabs. The blue fluid didn’t spill randomly. It swelled into a perfectly circular, glowing azure pool five paces wide, its surface rippling with golden threads of Primordial Chaos qi.
At the center of the pool, two curved white eyes blinked merrily upward at Su Ling’er.
“Dao Spirit,” Lin Xiao communicated, his mind pulsing through his fluid mass. “Engage multi-threaded sight and spiritual data ingestion. Deploy micro-tendril arrays.”
“Data acquisition protocol engaged,” Dao Spirit responded crisply. “Allocating 85% of parallel computing threads to sight scanning, spiritual hum decoding, and semantic indexing. Starting mass archival acquisition.”
From the outer edge of the azure pool, thousands of gossamer-thin, semi-clear blue tendrils began to sprout. They were as fine as spun silk, almost weightless. But each one was a tiny extension of Lin Xiao’s Primordial Chaos mind.
