To an ordinary fighter, slipping into the dark, enclosed inside of an ancient doomsday engine would have been tantamount to stepping into an iron tomb.
To Lin Xiao, it felt like sliding down a remarkably smooth, well-angled water slide.
Flowing through the narrow four-inch bronze sky-slits between the black glass breastplates, Lin Xiao’s azure slime body elongated into a ribbon of shimmering cerulean fluid. He navigated the internal load-bearing lattice with easy grace, squeezing past thick copper power bars, bronze high-pressure pistons, and massive linked dark rock balance wheels that had remained frozen in mid-rotation since the First Epoch.
He reached the central chest vault. Then, the space widened into a ball-shaped chamber roughly the size of a mountain pavilion.
Suspended at the dead center of the chamber within a gimbaled bronze armature was the titan’s heart. A soccer-ball-sized sphere of pure, crystal-clear Earth-Core Stone. Under normal circumstances, this ancient relic was meant to radiate a warm, golden terrestrial light, channeling world-size life-force through the build’s blood-flow channels.
Now, however, the golden stone was virtually invisible beneath an ugly, writhing shroud of leech-like darkness.
A massive, bulbous mass of Ming-Sha rotting mycelium—clinging to the crystal like an enraged black sea urchin—throbbed with a sickly, sluggish rhythm. Its barbed hard-shelled hyphae were drilled inches deep into the crystal’s facets, drinking the stone’s sacred terrestrial radiance and converting it into thick, poisonous black tar. Wherever the weeping tar touched the golden circuitry lining the chamber walls, the metal was pitted and blistered…
