High atop the Old Imperial Signal Bluff, the northern wind shrieked against the upright dark rock walls with the fury of a wounded mountain cat.
Lin Tao knelt in the center of the three-sided stone shelf, his traveling cloak whipped backward by the gale. Before him, the Grand Ancestor’s Precursor Relic rested flat upon the frozen bedrock, its six-sided star-iron casing humming with power. A thick, braided grounding cable made of cold-drawn copper wire ran from the relic’s main negative end-post directly into the six-pound hardened steel wedge that Tie Shan had driven into the quartz bedrock.
Tie Shan stood three paces behind him, his broad boots rooted into the stone, his hands resting upon the cold stock of his twelve-pound iron pry-bar. The giant’s dark eyes swept the canyon below with unblinking vigilance. It watched the chaotic logjam forming at the mouth of the defile.
Lin Tao drew his four-inch steel land-mapper metal pen. With slow, tuned pressure, he unlocked the backup retaining sleeve and extended the pure-crystal star-white-gold micro-needle to its total maximum length. One hundred and fifty-a tiny fraction of an inch.
The moment the needle reached full extension, Lin Tao docked its base into the central transceiver socket of the Precursor Relic.
