The shift from golden sunlight to choking twilight occurred in less than ten seconds.
High above Mount Taiyi, the crisp blue mountain sky fractured along sharp-angled fault lines. Clouds that had been drifting peacefully in the alpine wind froze dead in their tracks, their edges sharpening into pixelated, polygonal blocks of dark violet and bruised indigo.
The surrounding heat inside the suspended colosseum dropped precipitously. It plunged from twenty degrees to below freezing in a single, painful breath. Frost crusted across the star-iron mid-air chains. The breath of ten thousand spectators misted into white plumes of vapor.
In the center of the upper sky, the violet clouds parted.
A huge, six-sided sky-slit—three miles wide, bordered by glowing Precursor glyphs of pulsing crimson—opened directly in the upper air.
It wasn’t a spiritual eye summoned by an immortal patriarch.
It was a self-running system monitoring sky-slit.
From the center of the six-sided sky-slit, a massive beam of deep violet light dropped like a pillar of solid glass. It struck the center of the dueling floor thirty paces from where Lin Tao and Tie Shan stood.
