At Floor Forty-Five, four hundred and fifty feet above the mountain volcano bowl, the invisible spiral ramp ended suddenly against a sheer upright plane of star-iron.
Lin Tao stopped six inches from the drop-off, his hand resting against the cold, invisible outside wall.
To the left, the ledge simply ended. A clean, ninety-degree edge where the crash polygons had been clipped by the compiler. Beyond that edge lay empty sky and a five-hundred-foot drop into the unrendered gray fog. To the right, the wall of the pagoda rose fully upright for nearly two hundred feet, entirely smooth and devoid of ledges, windows, or load-bearing handholds.
Tie Shan stood close behind him, his massive back shielding Lin Tao from the freezing sixty-knot alpine gale that whipped around the corner of the tower.
“Road is gone,” Tie Shan said, his deep voice rumbling against Lin Tao’s shoulder.
“The public road is gone,” Lin Tao corrected. He pulled his land-mapper metal pen from his cuff. “The master builders stopped compiling the decorative outside slope at the forty-fifth tier to save polygon memory. But a heavy-duty testing sandbox must always have an upkeep access path.”
Lin Tao extended the star-white-gold micro-needle to its maximum four-inch length. He focused his Precursor test vision, feeding power from his living neural bus until his left eye burned with cold, pale gold light.
