The sound was not an earthquake.
An earthquake was a low-hum rumble born from earth-shaking friction—the grinding of underground granite plates shaking through bedrock.
This sound had zero friction. It was a sharp, cold and exact, high-hum blended chirp that repeated with exact regularity every one hundred and twenty seconds:
PING.
Shaking straight through the white-marble tiles of the Northern Finishing Terrace, the man-made sound pulse rang directly inside the dantians of forty thousand fighters.
Core Formation students felt their golden cores skip a beat. Nascent Soul elders caught their breath as an electric shiver traveled along their spines, disrupting the breath flow of spiritual qi. Across the terrace, flying swords hummed inside their sword sheaths with high-pitched metal whines, and protective amulets grew warm against the skin of royal scions.
“What’s that?” Duke Jiang Hong muttered, backing away while clutching his spiritual core. “A deep-sea creature awakening beneath the continent?”
“It’s not a beast,” Patriarch Zhang Zhen said, staring down at the trembling marble slabs. “It feels like an invisible needle striking the core.”
