When the master power breaker on a world-size mainframe trips, the silence is not peaceful. It’s terrifying.
Frank’s steel-toed insulating boots touched the white marble flat stone slabs at the base of the ladder. Then, the blinding cyan light wrapping the Central Primordial Stele vanished. It didn’t dim gracefully. It cut out fully, as if an invisible hand had pulled the main disconnect at the power yard. The three-hundred-foot obelisk went pitch-black. A jagged dark shape against the mountain air that seemed to swallow all surrounding light.
At the same time, the surrounding spiritual qi that had circulated through the Primordial Sacred Lands for one hundred thousand years ceased to flow. The pressure dropped to total zero. Fighters who had spent their entire lives surrounded by dense sky mist suddenly gasped for air like fish tossed onto dry gravel. Dantians sputtered and stalled like carburetors starved of fuel. Spiritual roots shriveled into emergency defense modes. Flying swords hovering twenty paces in the air lost their floating charges, plunging to the dragon-bone marble with metal clatters like dropped cutlery. Even the ancient defensive wards protecting the outer edge of the Sacred Lands sputtered out into pale grey dust.
“My... My spiritual sea!” an 8-Star Grand Elder shrieked, clutching his stomach and collapsing to his knees. “The leylines have cut! The Heavens have gone cold!”
