The clean-room inside Sub-Vault Zero was divided by a twelve-inch partition of solid lead and crushed magnetic iron.
On the “Dirty” side sat Lin Ke and Shen Yue, protected by heavy bronze-mesh goggles and an array of test sight prisms. Resting inside an evacuated iron bell jar on their table was one of the captured Upper Realm spatial plates.
On the “Clean” side of the lead partition sat Elder Wu DeZheng.
The old administrator had zero access to the sky artifacts. He had never seen an Upper Realm rune in his life. Before him lay forty reams of plain mulberry paper, a well of black pine-soot ink, and six sharpened wolf-hair brushes.
“Clean-Room Protocol activated,” Lin Ke announced through a brass speaking tube. “Elder Wu, you’ll receive only exact vectors and heat-powered measurements. Don’t try to guess the theology.”
“I’m ready, Chancellor Lin,” Wu’s voice echoed through the tube. He shook slightly, but his brushes were laid out with military order. “I know nothing of Heaven. I know only balancing ledgers.”
In the mental sandbox, Lin Ke established the sense firewall.
The danger of decompiling sky spatial arrays was not theoretical. The runes contained an active psychic countermeasure. An encrypted payload called the Celestial Intellectual Property Ward.
