The sound that echoed across the heavens was not thunder.
It was a voice—huge, clockwork, and shaking with eighty thousand years of wounded office pride.
“Mortal!” the Heavenly Dao Avatar bellowed from the upper air, its golden runes flashing in violent, desynchronized red pulses. “Release the Judgment of the Dao! You can’t contain the Primordial Law with crude earthly tongs! Release it, or the sky vault shall collapse into the void!”
The entire dome of the sky shuddered, weeping sheets of static rain that crackled across the granite mountain flanks like dropped fireworks.
Frank stood on the glass-fused glass of Tongtian Apex, his knees bent. His jaw was clenched, and his boots rooted to the rock.
The red rubber handles of his linesman pliers were humming at three thousand cycles per second. It shook with enough clockwork torque to snap the axle clean off of a locomotive.
The blue-grey smoke from his leather work gloves was getting thicker.
Frank didn’t release the bolt.
