The sound of two land-wide shelves grinding together was not a rumble. It was a shriek that set every tooth on Tongtian Apex shaking inside its gumline.
Three thousand miles to the south, the Great Void Deep pit became a churning cooking pot of raw ground-shaking fury.
The simulated size 9.0 shear earthquake—generated by the self-running stress-testing subroutines of the Heavenly Dao Avatar—ripped through the mantle rock like a circular saw through dry pine.
Earth-shaking plates shifted twenty-four feet laterally in opposite directions.
Spatial rifts within the deep gap blew up in chain-reaction explosions, unleashing a Category-5 hurricane of razor-sharp void wind that whipped across the three-thousand-mile deep pit at four hundred miles per hour.
“The cables will snap!” shrieked an elder from the Sovereign Sword Pavilion, clutching his bald head. “No metal forged in the mortal realm can endure lateral land-wide shear combined with void-vortex rough churning! It will sway, twist, and plunge into the deep pit!”
On the porch of Classroom 404, Frank didn’t even put down his tea mug.
“Reminds me of an old crossing over the Galloping Gorge,” Frank remarked casually. He leaned against the wooden railing. “A mid-air span that twisted itself into scrap metal in a forty-mile-an-hour crosswind because the builders used a solid plate girder instead of an open truss and forgot about wind-cutting vortex shedding. Any apprentice could have told them the wind was driving twisting flutter at the ringing hum.”
