The night outside the barrier was lit up by a nonstop storm of silent lightning.
Across seventy leagues of interconnected galleries, from the ruined entrance of Entry hall 301 to the grand forecourt of the thirty-first gate, the upright curtain of silver-blue light stood ninety arm-lengths tall. It didn’t flicker. It didn’t waver in the drafts. It hummed at one hundred and fourteen Hertz—a pitch so pure and ringing that it turned the entire outer edge into a shaking knife-edge of aligned ancient Dao. The light was cool, casting fine, detailed, rippling reflections across the high coffered vaults like sunlight dancing on the floor of a shallow lagoon.
Against that blade of light, the void-locusts threw themselves by the millions.
Zhu Heling could not accept what his instruments were telling him. From the brass-plated bridge of the Abyssal Siphon, the Scholar had monitored the deployment of his swarm with exact arrogance. To him, the universe was an equation of pressure, heat energy, and yield. A barefoot water mapper using stone-hard pine resin and silt should have collapsed after ten leagues. A line drawn by hand should have fractured at the first stepped terrace.
Enraged by the sudden loss of his forward dredgers, the Scholar had disengaged the safety governors on all sixteen breeding vats.
