The black dark rock foundation radiated a cold so intense it felt greasy to the touch.
It sucked the body heat straight out of Lin Ke’s palms through the cracks in the flat stone slabs.
Above him in the midnight fog, the Nine-Tier Bone-Crushing Gravity Pagoda rose three hundred feet into the overcast sky. A massive stone, nine-sided spire carved from a single fiery dark rock core. It didn’t look built. It looked like a jagged black fang punched through the mountain’s crust.
A low-hum shook through the mist, so deep it rang directly in Lin Ke’s pelvic bones. That made the bile in his stomach tremble.
In the outer courtyard fifty paces away, half a dozen cripples sat huddled around a smoldering fire bowl of coke melted rock waste.
They were former outer students who had entered the Pagoda during last triennial trials and failed to reach the upper thresholds. Their spines were curved like dried prawns, their kneecaps crushed inward by deep water pressure. They walked only with the aid of iron crutches that clicked mournfully across the stone.
They didn’t speak. They only stared at the dark tower with vacant, hollow eyes. They listened to the mountain hum.
Lin Ke crouched in the shadow of a drainage under-road drain twenty paces from the Pagoda’s southern retaining wall.
He needed tracking data. Entering a multi-tier gravity array without knowing its ringing hum, duty cycles, or load spreading was the working equivalent of hot-plugging live three-phase power into an ungrounded server rack.
He held his iron metal pen between his fingertips.
The midnight wind froze. The oily black smoke from the cripples’ fire bowl turned to solid grey threads against the dark.
In the mental sandbox, Lin Ke pressed the tip of his iron metal pen against the foundation stone and pulsed a micro-packet of Crimson Yang Qi into the bedrock to map the formation’s deep ring.
Active sonar ping.
Run 01: The micro-packet leaves the metal pen. The foreign energetic signed name touches the dark rock. Then, three golden runes flared along the baseboard like phosphorus matches. A sound alarm shrieked across the courtyard. Four Foundation Establishment guards dropped from the second-tier low roof walls. It crushed his neck under iron poleaxes before he could take three breaths.
Lin Ke snapped back to meatspace, his throat tight with phantom asphyxiation.
He slid his left hand beneath his cloak and jabbed the needle point into his thumb pad.
The sharp, ugly sting broke the panic. A thick droplet of blood welled up.
“Branch checked,” he whispered into the fog. “Main.”
No active probing, he noted coldly, wiping the blood away. The outer edge is monitored by signed name-based intrusion detection. Active packets trigger an alarm.
If active sonar was blocked, he had to switch to passive network listening.
Lin Ke untied his right boot and pulled it off. He exposed his bare foot to the freezing night air.
He planted his bare heel firmly against the polished dark rock baseboard of the southern retaining wall.
His Ashen Iron Lattice bones—hardened by stone-hard stone deposits—acted as high-fidelity sound waveguides. Unlike soft flesh, which muffled clockwork shaking, his stone-hard skeleton sent blast waves with near-zero signal loss.
The shakes rose through the sole of his foot.
They traveled up his heel, rang through the Ashen Iron Lattice in his shin. Then they climbed his spine like electric current. They turned directly into his internal test HUD.
The Pagoda was not a static stone tower. It was an active, high-power engine.
Deep beneath the mountain, four underground spirit-wells were driving massive earth-heat moving pumps. They forced tightly packed Qi through thousands of runic channels. That created a sustained, thirty-seven-hertz gravity standing wave that pinned every grain of dust to the floor.
Thirty-seven hertz, Lin Ke logged mentally. That is the carrier hum. Anything moving inside the tower will have to harmonize with that pulse, or suffer destructive clockwork interference.
He kept his heel pinned to the stone for ninety seconds, counting his heartbeats.
Then, he felt it.
At the sixty-second mark, the low hum didn’t peak cleanly.
The shaking stuttered. A tiny shudder rippled through the dark rock. It was followed by a faint, hollow grinding sound deep inside the southern pillar. It was like an ungreased gear slipping a tooth before catching the drive train again.
A zero-point-five-second phase drift.
Every sixty seconds, the southern foundation pillar lagged behind the other three sectors by half a beat.
Lin Ke pulled his foot back, slipped his boot back on, and tied the hemp laces with swift, steady motions. He leaned forward, inspecting the runic baseboard with the naked eye.
Under the faint moonlight, he could see where the black dark rock met the solid mountain stone.
Along the seams of the southern pillar, the carved formation lines were slightly misaligned, filled in with hasty, crude layers of spirit-lead solder. Fine, hair-thin stress fractures radiated outward from the seam like spiderwebs in frozen glass.
Lin Ke ran his fingers along the fractured stone, his lips parting in a cold, humorless smile.
“That isn’t natural settlement wear,” he murmured into the freezing darkness. “The southern pillar is suffering from an unhandled clock drift.”