The central check chamber of the Regional Checker office had grown quiet as the noon bells faded across the terraces of the Central Peak.
On the massive walnut table, Lin Tao had arranged seven distinct regional maps, piecing them together like a fine, detailed mosaic of dried thick parchment and sheepskin. Lined up edge to edge. Then, the single charts formed a huge seven-foot six-sided mandala that represented the complete defensive and infrastructural network of the Azure Cloud Sect.
Tie Shan sat on an iron-heavy stool in the corner of the room, using a coarse whetstone to dress the square striking face of his twelve-pound pry-bar. The rhythmic, rasping scrape of hardened steel against mountain slate filled the chamber with a soothing, clockwork rhythm.
Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.
Lin Tao didn’t look up from the blueprints. His four-inch land-mapper metal pen hovered over the central junction where thirty-six main channel lines came together beneath the mountain’s roots.
A distributed network, Lin Tao observed internally, is only as tough as its shared public works layer. You can harden every outer edge firewall until it deflects direct lightning, but if the cooling pumps in the server basement run dry, the entire cluster melts from the inside out.
