In the pitch-black air of Sector Four, the sounds of dying men became terrifyingly distinct.
Deprived of visual stimuli, the trapped miners could hear only the wild hammering of their own pulses, the wet rattle of choked lungs, and the steady, rhythmic tap... Tap... Tap... of Lin Tao’s steel metal pen against the granite wall.
The air was growing noticeably thick, sour, and choking. Carbon dioxide was pooling along the floor of the drift like an invisible lake of poison, displacing the lighter oxygen upward toward the shattered ceiling arches. Several of the older laborers had already slumped sideways into the drainage ditch, their limbs twitching with the early symptoms of hypoxia, their minds drifting into the dull lethargy that precedes asphyxiation. The air smelled of stale water, old sweat. The sharp, coppery tang of ungrounded static from the fractured Precursor channels above.
Tie Shan moved through the darkness like an invisible mountain. His heavy boots splashed through the ditch as he hauled fainting men up onto the dry timber platforms to keep their faces out of the toxic slurry.
“Breathe shallow,” Tie Shan grunted into the dark, his voice a steadying anchor for the weeping men. “Lin Tao is working. Keep your mouths shut and your heads up.”
At the left boundary of the fallen monolith, Lin Tao stood fully still.
His left eye was burning with an intense, glowing-green glare that pierced the darkness. To his augmented vision, the pitch-black tunnel was lit up in razor-sharp wireframe vectors. Every tiny crevice, every quartz vein, every plane of earth-shaking cleavage was mapped in glowing green map point lines that shone against the dark bedrock.
Lin Tao moved his iron metal pen along the seam where the fifty-ton monolith pressed against the native metamorphic bedrock.
Under ordinary conditions, the contact between two rock faces was governed by normal friction and static normal force. But this monolith had not been placed here by quarrymen. It had fallen through a load-bearing void during an unhandled ground-shaking event.
The fifty-ton block wedged itself into the narrow hall. Then, its crash boundaries had overlapped with the native bedrock mesh by four point a tiny fraction of an inch.
In a well-kept physical system, such an intersection would trigger an immediate repulsive impulse, ejecting the colliding body until the boundaries were coplanar. But the Precursor stonework of this realm was decaying, its math cycles throttled down to a sluggish twenty-four frames per second.
When the two massive crash meshes tried to resolve their mutual penetration, the math overflowed.
Instead of repelling each other, the two planes had formed a non-pipe hub sharp-angled junction—a tear in the crash detection matrix running diagonally from the floor to the ceiling.
It was an unrendered seam.
To human touch, the seam felt like cold, solid stone. If a man threw his fist against it, the macro-level crash mesh would register the impact and break his knuckles.
But at the exact boundary hum of twenty-four cycles per second, the map point math dropped to zero for a fraction of a split second during each refresh cycle.
Lin Tao leaned his ear against the cold rock.
Through the cold iron metal pen, he could feel the micro-shakes of the mountain. One... Two... Three... Every twenty-fourth of a second, the deep underground hum hitched, like an engine skipping a spark.
Behind him, the wheezing of eighty choking men was growing weaker, punctuated by soft moans of despair.
“Lin Tao...” Old Man Geng wheezed from the dark floor behind him. “My chest... It feels like an anvil is resting on my ribs. My head is spinning... The air has no meat in it...”
“Tie Shan,” Lin Tao said, his voice cutting through the murk like a polished blade.
“Here,” the giant rumbled, stepping up beside him in the pitch black.
“Bring Old Geng to me,” Lin Tao instructed. “And tell the men to form a single line along the left wall. No shouting. No shoving. If anyone breaks rank, knock him unconscious.”
Tie Shan didn’t ask questions. He reached down into the dark, scooped up the trembling form of Old Man Geng with one massive arm. Then he set him on his feet beside Lin Tao.
“Listen to me, Old Geng,” Lin Tao whispered, placing the old smith’s callused hand against the cold stone at the exact map point junction. “Feel this crack.”
“I feel it,” the old man choked out, shivering. “It’s just rock, boy. Hard, cold granite. We can’t pass through stone. A mortal can’t walk through a mountain.”
“You’ll not pass through stone,” Lin Tao said softly, his left eye blazing with emerald light as he lined up the tip of his iron metal pen with the floating map point marker. “You’ll pass through the seam where the stone forgot to exist.”
Lin Tao took a long, steady breath, steadying his hand against the cold granite.
The map point was fluctuating, pulsing with faint violet sparks that only his left eye could detect. The twenty-four cycle refresh was drifting by fractions of a heartbeat. If his timing was off by even a tenth of a cycle, the crash matrix would remain solid. The man crossing the threshold would be split in half by returning shape.
“Hold your breath, Old Geng,” Lin Tao murmured, his muscles tightening like steel springs. “And don’t close your eyes.”
Around them in the pitch darkness, the trapped miners huddled closer together, drawn instinctively toward the faint emerald glow that came from Lin Tao’s left eye. In their superstitious minds, that glowing light was not an optic projection. It was the sacred spirit-fire of an ancient cave sage who had walked into their tomb to guide them back to the realm of the living.
Old Man Geng swallowed hard, his throat clicking like dry sticks. He could feel the cool air streaming from the hairline fracture where Lin Tao’s iron metal pen was wedged. It was a bizarre, unnatural sensation. It was cold, moving air blowing out of solid, unbroken granite that should have been ten miles thick.
“Tie Shan,” Lin Tao whispered into the dark.
“Right here,” the giant rumbled, his boots planted firmly in the mud.
“Keep them in single file,” Lin Tao said, his teeth clicking together as a surge of static electricity sparked along his jawline. “The moment the seam opens, the mountain will try to resolve the rule-break. If anyone hesitates, throw him through.”
Tie Shan tightened his grip on his iron pry-bar. His dark shape was dark and unmoving against the faint green light. “Understood. No one hesitates.”