The Grand Stele of Fate stood at the northern edge of the dueling floor. A towering slab of semi-clear white green jade sixty feet tall, embedded deep into the arena’s foundation stonework.
Carved into its glowing surface were hundreds of fine, detailed Precursor runes, continuously shifting and reordering themselves to form the tournament brackets. Arrayed around the base of the stele were thirty-two runic channels forged from star-bronze, pulsing with a rhythmic, emerald soft glow that mirrored the underlying world clock.
Lin Tao knelt beside one of the low stone outer edge benches near the base of the stele, pretending to adjust the leather laces of his iron-toed marching boots.
His right sleeve slid back slightly.
From his cuff, he slipped his four-inch cold-drawn steel land-mapper metal pen. He held the tool in a reverse grip. He pressed the fine star-white-gold micro-needle firmly against the seam between two massive slabs of foundation granite.
A sharp, tiny spark leaped from the stone into the metal pen. It sent a tiny current of test data directly into the eye nerve of his left eye.
Lin Tao’s pupils tightened slightly.
The entire arena was governed by an ancient, unbending Precursor arbitration kernel. Just as he had observed in the Sector Four quarry and inside the Demon Trial Pagoda, the physical reality of this world didn’t operate on nonstop Newtonian mechanics. It was a discrete, sampled test model.
