The jade slate in the center of the vault was a successful prototype, but a slate couldn’t dodge a cannonball.
To survive the arrival of the Starry Suppression Fleet, Lin Ke couldn’t rely on carrying heavy stone slabs in his pockets. The clean-room spatial logic had to be integrated directly into his living training—into his own Soul Formation domain.
In traditional sects, integrating spatial laws took three hundred years of sitting in a cave, or bending one’s knee to a royal envoy to receive a proprietary sky firmware patch.
Lin Ke had neither three hundred years nor any desire to wear a royal collar.
He sat cross-legged on the stone dais of Sub-Vault Zero, surrounded by three tons of lead shielding.
Above his head, the lead hatch was open by three inches. It allowed a thin, collimated beam of aligned sky heat wave from the Cloud Gateway to enter the chamber, focused through a quartz prism onto his brow.
In the mental sandbox, Lin Ke deployed the newly unlocked stone-built tool:
git cherry-pick.
