The beam didn’t strike like lightning. It sliced like a blazing bright razor knife.
A ray of condensed violet light, no thicker than a man’s thumb, lanced out from the curved reflector above the daemon’s gauntlet. It crossed the forty paces between the central stone base and the northern outer edge in less than a split second. It struck a five-ton granite boulder that had stood on the summit since the dawn of the sect.
There was no explosion. No shower of jagged shrapnel, no ear-splitting blast of displaced air.
Where the beam touched the rock, the physical matter simply dissolved into a cloud of glowing, wireframe cubes. For the space of a single heartbeat, Lin Tao could see the internal structure of the granite. Not as stone crystals of quartz and pink rock, but as an orderly, three-space-folding mesh of sharp-angled voxels. Then, with a faint, high-pitched hiss like escaping steam, the voxels collapsed into white starlight and vanished into the void.
Half of the five-ton boulder was fully gone, snapped off with mirror-smooth, atom-deep care.
Lin Tao rolled across the frost-covered stone, his traveling mantle catching on the sharp edge of a dark rock fissure. He felt the intense heat wave of the beam singe the hair on the back of his neck, the smell of burnt horn-protein sharp in his nostrils.
