Nine hundred and eighty feet above the mountain volcano bowl, Lin Tao stood before the final outside threshold of the Hundred-Floor Demon Trial Pagoda.
Floor One Hundred was not built like the ninety-nine tiers beneath it. It was an impregnable, seamless dome of dark stellar star-iron, forty paces in width, fully empty of external seams, air-flow grates, or load-bearing flanges. The ancient master builders had compiled the summit as a total quarantine sandbox, designed to hold the Primordial Precursor Core in permanent solitude from the world-size network.
Lin Tao knelt upon the white green jade ledge that circled the outer edge of Floor Ninety-Nine.
The wind here had died down to a faint, freezing draft, muffled by the huge magnetic damping field that radiated from the summit dome. Lin Tao extended his land-mapper metal pen. He ran the star-white-gold needle along the base of the star-iron inner wall.
Three paces to the west of the load-bearing centerline, his test needle registered a sharp, nearby drop in metal thickness.
A four-foot by four-foot upkeep hatch.
The hatch was flush with the surrounding star-iron stonework, its seams sealed by a tiny layer of ice-cold resin that had remained undisturbed for thousand years. But at the center of the hatch, half-hidden beneath a crust of white rime frost, lay an indentation that made Lin Tao’s breath catch in his throat.
