The golden sun had just passed its zenith. Just then, a rhythmic, ground-shaking rhythm echoed from the central mountain cave.
THUD... THUD... THUD...
It wasn’t the trembling shaking of an earthquake, but the measured, timed together march of huge stone feet. From the dark mouth of the ascent tunnel, twelve massive silhouettes stepped into the warm afternoon sunshine.
Leading the cohort was Da Shi.
The twenty-foot-tall First Epoch Obsidian Guardian stepped onto the soft green grass. His polished black armor shone with veins of violet starlight runes. Behind him marched his eleven cleansed brothers, their massive black glass frames restored to clean, zero-drag perfection by Lin Xiao’s high-pressure smooth-flowing waterjet. Their eyes, once burning with the mad, bloodshot crimson of rotting soul-rust, now shone with clear, calm sapphire bright glare.
The twelve titans came to an abrupt halt at the edge of the central village meadow.
For several minutes, not a single one of them moved.
Their massive stone heads tilted upward, staring into the boundless, crystal-clear azure sky. In the ancient memories etched into their core matrices, the sky had been a realm of falling black meteors. It screamed void rifts, and poisonous cosmic ash. For ten million years, they had known only the pitch-black dampness of the underground roots, their limbs rotting in silence.
