The static electricity on Floor Eight raised the fine hairs on Lin Ke’s arms until they stood straight up.
Every five seconds, a blinding arc of violet lightning snapped across the ceiling. He struck the dark rock floor with a bone-shaking BANG that smelled of scorched copper and scorched ozone.
The heat streaming from the runaway core was choking, but the gravity pull was worse. It dragged inward toward the center of the room. That created an invisible, swirling vortex that tried to rip Lin Ke’s hands from the flat stone slabs.
The central magnetic spirit-iron sphere was wobbling at twenty-four thousand turns a minute.
One of the three massive nested gimbal rings—the outer north-south axis—had slipped its runic guide track by three inches.
Because the bearing had seized, the gimbal couldn’t rotate freely to balance the sphere’s huge angular driving force.
Instead, the entire assembly was shaking at a lethal deep ringing hum, groaning like an overloaded steam engine about to blow its boiler seams.
If the ring fractured under the outward-pulling torque, the magnetic holding field would collapse instantly. The gravity potential energy stored inside the nine tiers would snap inward into a nearby star-core, imploding the entire Pagoda and turning Mount Canglan’s summit into a crushed gravel pit.
