The southwest corner of Floor One appeared fully unremarkable to the unaugmented human eye.
It was simply the intersection of two towering walls of polished star-iron stonework meeting the dark rock floor at what seemed to be a perfect right angle. The stones had been cut by Precursor diamond saws tens of thousands of years ago, fit together with such tiny care that not even a strand of silk could be slipped between the joints. A heavy bronze baseboard ran along the floor, bolted into the foundation slabs with six-inch six-sided rivets. Hundreds of years of dust had settled into the hairline grooves. It formed a thin, gray patina over the ancient metal.
Lin Tao knelt five paces from the corner, his knees resting lightly upon the cold stone.
He drew his four-inch cold-drawn steel land-mapper metal pen from his sleeve and extended the star-white-gold micro-needle until its pure-crystal tip hovered three inches above the floor joint. He activated his Precursor test screen, feeding power from his living neural bus into the test needle.
In an instant, the superficial appearance of ancient stonework dissolved from his left visual field.
The black dark rock and star-iron walls were replaced by a fine, detailed three-space-folding wireframe mesh composed of millions of glowing green polygons. Every stone was rendered as an exact crash hull. A rigid sharp-angled boundary defined by vertex map points, edge equations, and surface normal vectors designed to prevent physical entities from piercing the load-bearing shape.
