High above the clouds, twenty miles into the freezing twilight of the extreme stratosphere, the tiny fluid probes didn’t merely observe.
Following Lin Xiao’s mental directive, the zero-drag chaos droplets seeped into the tiny joints of the huge bronze drain tube nexus. Slipping past the outer clockwork housings like water finding fissures in dry rock, they attached themselves directly to the ancient tracking data crystals embedded along the junction station’s runic spine.
“Accessing main working ledger,” Dao Spirit announced within Lin Xiao’s mindscape. “Bypassing ancient Seventh-Tier Starry Firewalls. Encryption algorithm is based on standard royal starlight permutations dating to the late Fourth Epoch. Decryption progress: 100%. Data cache unsealed.”
A torrent of historical working tracking data flooded into Lin Xiao’s mind.
What opened before his mind was not the poetic, sacred chronicle of divine ascension that human sects had sung of in ancient hymns for thousands of years. It was a self-running, heavy-duty billing manifest. It was cold, calculating, and drenched in the blood of ten thousand years.
In traditional training lore, the Heavenly Sky-trial was revered as Heaven’s sacred, impartial trial. Fighters believed that when a seeker approached the peak of their realm, the Heavenly Dao would cast down lightning to burn away their mortal waste scum. They tested their heart, moral purity, and karmic foundation. If their resolve was pure and their spirit unbending, they would survive the thunder, shed their mortal husk, and climb into the immortal heavens to dwell among the gods.
