The alpine plateau of the Demon Cloud Mountains was a dead zone of black glass and frozen foam-stone, perched nine thousand feet above the southern continent.
Here, the sky was no longer merely discolored. It was actively terrifying.
The natural azure of the upper troposphere had been fully displaced by a swirling vortex of deep, bruised bright purple light that crackled with silent, hair-raising static discharges. Above the clouds, invisible to mortal sight but blazing like a bright light of divine wrath in Lin Tao’s Precursor test vision, three nested targeting reticles spun in slow, clockwork exact timing.
Each aiming cross was a sprawling sharp-angled lattice of linked runes fifty leagues wide, converging with cold exact care upon the high volcano bowl of the Demon Peaks.
Four point two times ten to the eighteenth blasts of heat. That was not an assassination strike. It was a land-wide firmware scrub, designed to turn to steam all living and load-bearing anomalies within a fifty-league radius and flash-bake the world-size crust into sterile fiery glass.
Lin Tao halted by a jagged outcropping of black glass. He drew his four-inch cold-drawn steel metal pen from his sleeve. The metal felt uncomfortably warm against his fingers. The star-white-gold micro-needle hummed with an angry, high-pitched whine as it absorbed the rising magnetic potential of the surrounding air.
