Having cleanly finished his dessert beverage, Lin Xiao had no intention of letting the table be cleared.
High above the stratosphere, the continent-sized Void Broodmother Nihil-Kraken realized that the time for cosmic conquest had passed. The creature’s huge synaptic clusters, cold and ancient as dead stars, reached an unanimous conclusion: retreat. With a series of shuddering earth-shaking pops, the entity began withdrawing the outer-void anchors it had driven into the world-size mantle, seeking to pull its six-thousand-half-mile mantle backward through the ten-thousand-mile rift.
“Alert,” the Omniscient Dao Spirit chimed, projecting red tactical vectors across Lin Xiao’s mental sea. “Target is disengaging world-size anchors. Mass shifted weight indicates an emergency reverse-vector retreat into the outer-void deep pit.”
Lin Xiao tilted his forty-inch sapphire body forward, rippling with sudden, cheerful urgency.
“Oh no you don’t!” Lin Xiao called out in his thoughts. “You don’t get to smash our ceiling, make everyone deaf with your screaming, pour a massive pitcher of chocolate fudge. Then walk out without serving the main course! That’s terrible banquet manners!”
“Host’s anger is acknowledged,” the Dao Spirit responded smoothly. “To prevent target retreat, physical tethering and gravity lock are needed. Authorizing full deployment of [Ancient Viscoelastic Tether Array].”
