The charcoal fire bowl inside Chu Rong’s provisional pavilion glowed with an unnerving, blood-orange hue.
It didn’t burn mountain pine or hard coal. It burned blocks of refined Sun-Core Starmetal, venting dry, rotten-egg heat that dried the spit on Lin Ke’s tongue before he could swallow.
Resting inside the white-hot coals was an iron rod twelve inches long, tipped with a royal bronze brand shaped like an eye coiled inside a flame.
Envoy Chu Rong stood before the fire bowl, his silver robes pulled back to reveal his gaunt, angular frame. His golden clockwork eye-prisms whirred softly, clicking in uneven intervals as they focused on Lin Ke’s forehead.
“The ministry’s regional tracking data flagged your profile this morning, Scholar Lin,” Chu Rong said, his voice quiet, almost purring. “An uncultivated scholar with congenital glass spirit veins... Yet your soul-response registered the ringing signed name of a Third Epoch cadet branch. Curious. Very curious.”
Lin Ke stood in the center of the pavilion, his arms hanging loosely by his sides.
Behind his ribs, his real glassy glass spirit veins were running cold, dry. Then it throttled down to three percent idle throughput. Between his physical forehead and his actual sea of mind, he had deployed the air-gapped proxy buffer.
