The sky didn’t turn dark with clouds. It turned dark with shape.
By the second hour of the afternoon, the natural blue vault above Mount Taiyi had faded into a cold, artificial violet, the color of an overloaded potion-made flame. Across this unnatural expanse, faint glowing lines began to trace themselves across the upper air, connecting distant points of light into a huge, linked lattice of perfect hexagons.
Each hexagon spanned ten leagues across the heavens. Their borders glowing with was pale silver soft glow that cast razor-sharp, double shadows across the granite plateau.
Lin Tao stood in the center of the three Precursor star-iron spires. He wiped grease and crushed rock dust from his fingers with a rag.
The warning banners in his left eye flashed crimson, cycling at a deep hum with rhythmic persistence. For months, ever since his reality exploits in the lower sects and tournament arenas had piled up too many strange flaw flags, he had known this day would come. The Heavenly Dao was not a sentient, forgiving god. It was a self-running, decaying running system. When a secret user exploits too many dangling memory pointers and clips through too many boundary meshes, the system doesn’t debate morality.
