The sapphire radiance in the titan’s eyes didn’t blaze with the violent, scorching heat of mortal flames. It shone with the cool, deep stillness of an ancient underground lake reflecting midnight stars.
For three hundred thousand years, the iron-puppet’s sight sensors had processed nothing but blinding crimson static and screaming signals of phantom agony. Now, as the last leftovers of rotting rot dissolved under Lin Xiao’s Primordial Chaos digestion, thirty miles of internal First Epoch gold channels surged with pure, uncorrupted life.
The twenty-three-foot titan slowly raised its hands.
Its massive fingers, carved from flawless void-black glass and thick as ancient cedar beams, opened. Then he closed with mesmerizing fluidity. The horrifying screeching of rusted through stone gears was gone, replaced by a deep, silky clockwork whir. The titan turned its hands over, gazing at its own palms as if seeing them for the very first time. There was no pain. There was no fire gnawing at its marrow. There was only the gentle, rhythmic pulse of the purified Earth-Core Stone beating in its chest like a golden sun.
Slowly, the giant statue shifted its gaze downward.
Its sapphire sight lenses dilated, focusing upon the eighteen-year-old youth standing before it in azure linen robes. In the titan’s deep-spectrum crystal-clear vision, Lin Xiao didn’t appear as an ordinary mortal scholar. The iron-puppet’s pre-historic sense arrays detected the impossible to understand ocean of Primordial Chaos swirling within the youth’s core. The origin force that had existed before the heavens cracked and the…
