Above Floor Ninety, the Hundred-Floor Demon Trial Pagoda ceased to look like human stonework altogether.
Lin Tao and Tie Shan climbed past nine hundred and forty feet of height. Then, the outside wireframe changed in both color and composition. The dark, functional gray polygons of the lower tiers vanished, replaced by a fine, detailed lattice of glowing, semi-clear white jade and polished star-gold roof beams.
More remarkably, the Precursor master builders had abandoned all attempts to mask the underlying machine logic.
Inscribed directly into the glowing ribs of the outer hull, visible only to Lin Tao’s Precursor test vision, were thousands of glowing hex-code memory addresses etched in ancient, cold-drawn runic fonts:
0x7FFF_PRECURSOR_ROOT_ALLOC 0x8000_CORE_EXECUTION_PIPELINE 0x8040_BENCHMARK_SCOREBOARD_BUS
Lin Tao walked along the glittering white ledge, his fingers trailing along the cold surface of the star-gold ribs.
“This was never a temple,” Lin Tao murmured, his test left eye drinking in the cascading data buses that pulsed through the green jade frame. “The sects of the southern continent have spent ten thousand years worshipping this place as a holy crucible of spiritual enlightenment. They write epic poems about the old family trials. They send their greatest heirs to bleed and die in the lower chambers.”
