Senior Appraiser Feng led Lin Tao and Tie Shan into a fancy private viewing salon on the third floor of the pavilion.
The room was walled in fragrant bitter pine-resin wood to repel moisture, lit by floating crystal globes that cast a soft, shadowless white light across a low table of carved black walnut. On the table rested a heavy, lead-lined bronze chest, secured by a three-fold clockwork combination lock stamped with the Precursor seal.
Feng pulled a small brass key from his ring, twisted it twice. Then he lifted the heavy lid with a dramatic flourish.
Inside, resting upon a bed of black velvet, lay three slender needles of shimmering, non-shiny star-white-gold alloy.
Each needle was barely two inches long and no thicker than a horsehair. But even under the surrounding white light, the metal didn’t gleam like ordinary polished silver. It absorbed the light, streaming a faint, violet soft glow that pulsed with a steady, unchanging hum of twenty-four cycles per second.
The star-white-gold micro-needle in the lead-lined chest seemed to possess a physical presence that defied its tiny dimensions. Lin Tao leaned closer, his left eye analyzing the core posture of the metal. The star-white-gold had been refined under zero-gravity conditions by ancient Precursor sky-high foundries, resulting in a crystal-clear lattice so tightly packed that even spiritual qi couldn’t find a defect to scatter against. To a traditional daoist fighter, an ancient object without spiritual formations was dead iron. To Lin Tao, it was the purest physical…
