The pressure made the air taste like hot brass and dry lime.
High above the Azure Cloud Citadel, the Null-Pointer Titan took its first full step onto the outer ring of the sect’s mountain defenses.
There was no boom. There was no shower of fractured granite or cloud of dust.
Where twelve forested peaks had stood for forty thousand years, there were now five perfectly flat, sharp-angled voids. The rock, the pines, the ancient training shrines, and the mountain goats didn’t fall or shatter. Their map points simply disappeared from the register of space.
The mountain-protecting barrier shivered. Its main spirit conductors—eight-inch copper channels laid into the granite trenches—glowed orange, then white. Then boiled away into copper gas as the formation tried to push energy into an infinite flow pushback void.
“Formations are dead!” a watch-elder shrieked, falling backward from the low roof wall. “The earth itself refuses to answer!”
Lin Ke stood on the shattered terrace, his bandaged right arm throbbing with a dull, heavy pulse.
Beside him, Meng Shan had already dropped into a low, iron-rooted stance, his Adamantine Tower Shield humming with deep ochre light as he absorbed the blast wave of the collapsing air pressure.
