The silence came first.
Not the absence of noise, but the total cessation of clockwork friction.
For five years, ever since Colin Shaw had awakened in the body of Lin Ke with congenital Glass Spirit veins, there had always been an internal background hum. The nervous, sound shaking of glassy waveguide channels straining under the relentless crushing pressure of Qi that wanted to stretch what couldn’t be stretched.
Now, that shaking was gone.
Lin Ke lay on his back on the buckled brass deck of the Primordial Dais. He stared up into the vast underground vault where the four-mile pillar of light had pierced the ceiling.
Within his Dantian, the new engine sat in spotless, balanced balance.
His Golden Core was no longer a churning sphere of boiling liquid Yang fire.
It was a solid, tri-layer nested crystal-clear core, exactly one point two inches in width. It was carved from dense sky diamond, its facet shape lined up along sixty-four crystal-clear axes that refracted spiritual light into sharp, sharp-angled prisms.
