Deep within the land-wide crust, twenty miles beneath the living roots of the ancient forest, the earth surrendered its ancient hold.
It wasn’t a total rupture. There was no violent grinding of earth-shaking plates, no shattering of granite foundations, and no rain of falling boulders. Instead, the release was as smooth and deliberate as an ocean vessel casting off its heavy mooring ropes after hundreds of years in dry dock.
Along the fifty-mile outer edge of the Five Sacred Peaks, the pre-historic boundary joints carved by Emperor Xuan Yuan’s artificers came alive.
These joints were not jagged natural fault lines. They were tiny, diamond-cut planes of polished dark rock. They were separated by cushions of dormant tightly packed stellar gas. Lin Xiao engaged the geogravitic keel. Then, the dormant gas swelled with a gentle, sharp air hiss. The linked stone teeth of the land-wide mantle retracted by three inches, then three feet, then thirty yards.
The mountain was free.
At the severance line, a deep-rock phenomenon unfolded.
Where the rock detached from the land-wide bedrock, huge rings of golden cloud vapor blossomed from the deep fissure. This was not ordinary water fog. It was condensed world-size ozone infused with high-grade spiritual marrow. It glowed with a soft, radiant amber light. The vapor rolled outward in billows twenty miles wide. It formed a huge sky cushion that wrapped around the underside of the newly freed landmass. The dense vapor smelled of sweet night dew and stone-hard pine resin, banishing every trace…
