Tie Shan was a man who had faced wild sabre-toothed mountain wolves, bent iron bars with his bare hands, and stood unblinking before the killing intent of Foundation Establishment elders.
Yet watching a seventeen-year-old youth in a patched linen tunic take a leisurely stroll across thirty feet of empty air over a boiling pool of sulfuric acid was enough to make even the granite-hard body-refiner pause for half a heartbeat.
“Invisible road,” Tie Shan rumbled, his dark eyes fixed on Lin Tao’s boots.
“A crash boundary that the world forgot to erase,” Lin Tao explained. He turned slightly on the invisible platform forty feet above the steaming pit. “The iron grating rusted away three hundred years ago. But the physical bounding box in the running system was never deallocated. The universe still thinks there’s floor here. Step onto my mark, Tie Shan. Trust the shape.”
Tie Shan took a slow, deep breath, tightening the straps of his ox-hide harness until the leather groaned. He didn’t ask how a mortal youth possessed the power to command the invisible winds of the earth. He simply placed his right iron-shod boot directly into the footprint Lin Tao had just vacated.
Clack.
The invisible surface held.
