The stone slab was three feet thick, carved from solid black dark rock. Then it covered in five hundred years of undisturbed bat guano.
Lin Ke scraped the muck away with the edge of an iron trowel. He showed an eight-sided indentation in the center of the end-post dais. The indentation was shaped like a plain iron coin with a square center hole. The exact shape of the Precursor Access Token he had retrieved from the abandoned foundry depths.
He reached into his tunic and pressed the heavy iron disc into the socket.
A dull clockwork clatter echoed beneath his boots.
Two brass balance weights dropped somewhere three levels down, their chains whistling through grease-caked channels. On the surface of the dark rock desk, thin channels etched into the stone began to glow with a faint, glowing-green glowing, lighting the darkness of Sub-Vault Zero with cold, emerald bright glare.
Lin Ke placed his palms flat against the green stone channels.
For months, an unanswered question had gnawed at his building instincts. Why was the Grand Yan Empire so unbeatable?
It wasn’t merely the size of their armies or the number of Golden Core masters they kept in the Imperial City. In every historical record he had read in the sect’s outer library, whenever a Royal Judge arrived at an independent country sect, even ancient elders who had cultivated for three hundred years would bow their heads and submit without striking a single blow.
