He crouched inside a dry drainage ditch five paces from the outer wooden wall of Pen Two. Lin Tao unclasped his field kit with slow, razor-sharp deliberation.
The air here was freezing, cold enough to turn mortal breath to ice crystals upon eyebrows and eyelashes. But Lin Tao felt no chill. His permanent zero-byte dantian buffer sat at the center of his lower belly. A cold, empty star-core that absorbed zero outside flux. That left his body awareness entirely unclouded by spiritual pressure or rotting static.
Beside him, Tie Shan knelt in the frozen mud, his broad back pressed against the earthen berm. The giant held his twelve-pound pry-bar vertically against his chest, ready to lever any approaching guard into the ditch within a split second.
Lin Tao drew his four-inch cold-drawn steel land-mapper metal pen. With a delicate twist of the knurled brass locking collar, he extended the pure-crystal star-white-gold micro-needle to its maximum length of six inches.
He reached up, angling the needle toward the nearest dropping black silk thread hanging from the giant beast bone tower thirty paces away.
He didn’t touch the thread directly. To do so would risk triggering a spark ground fault that might alert the deacon on the tower. Instead, he brought the star-white-gold needle within three tiny fractions of an inch of the thread, using the needle’s ultra-high test bandwidth to sample the surrounding magnetic leakage streaming from the current-carrying silk.
