The underground chamber blazed with the light of a tiny dawn.
Within the huge azure cocoon, Lin Xiao kept his steady, rhythmic breathing. His stretchy mass remained stretched across eighty meters of open space. He wrapped the palace-sized crystal sphere in a seamless embrace of cool, semi-clear sapphire jelly. Through his jelly-like skin, billions of golden origin stars orbited in calm circles. It cast soft, waving patterns of starlight across the one hundred and forty-four thousand six-sided mirrors lining the cave walls.
The wild, sobbing thirst of the Earth-Core Leyline Heart had begun to subside.
Over the past quarter of an hour, the crystal had drunk over one billion units of refined Primordial Chaos Qi. The results were nothing short of miraculous. Along the outer shell of sky diamond-jade, the forty-eight thousand two hundred hairline micro-fractures had fully knitted together. Veins of liquid starlight gold filled every former fault line, polishing the outer surface until it gleamed like a mirror of virgin ice. The sickly, ashen gray pallor that had smothered the ancient engine was fully gone, replaced by a deep, radiant amber and sapphire luminosity.
Yet, as the outer surface smoothed into perfect clarity, an unexpected phenomenon occurred.
The outer diamond-jade shell, once cloudy and solid from millions of years of piled up stone rusting, turned entirely see-through.
