At Floor Ninety, nine hundred feet above the mountain volcano bowl, the sky air began to hum with an unnatural, high-pitched spark back-and-forth swing.
Lin Tao stopped on the narrow outside ledge, his test eye flashing with urgent yellow tracking data warnings.
A decennial global refresh wave.
Every ten years, coinciding with the opening of the trial portal, the central core of the Hundred-Floor Demon Trial Pagoda carried out a self-running sector-wide garbage collection sweep across its upper ten tiers. A massive pulse of purified turquoise potion-made energy radiated outward from the central core to turn to steam piled up waste scum, reset broken clockwork automatons, and recompile outside map points.
Inside the trial chambers, the pulse was harmlessly channeled through zero-pushback copper channels embedded in the dark rock walls.
Outside on the unrendered crash wireframe, however, there were no channels.
The static-electric potential of the approaching refresh wave would sweep across the outside hull as an ungrounded lightning storm of pure, spark-charged data flux. If that charge struck two living organisms standing upon an unrendered crash plane, their nervous systems would be boiled away by insulating breakdown within three split-seconds.
“Tie Shan, halt!” Lin Tao commanded, his voice sharp and hard as chipped flint.
