The anchor crystal of a Seventh-Rank Patch Daemon was a masterwork of Precursor sight building.
Up close, the six-sided pure-crystal prism measured eight inches in length and four inches across its six-sided faces. It was perfectly see-through, cut with such total sharp-angled care that its internal planes refracted the surrounding light into thousands of tiny, rainbow-colored interference bands. At the center of the crystal, suspended in an empty pocket cavity no larger than a plum, hovered a single teardrop of condensed, liquid violet fire.
The liquid starlight pulsed with an irregular, dying rhythm.
Lin Tao kept his metal pen firmly planted against the mounting collar. Through the star-white-gold needle, his test HUD mapped the internal stress tensor of the crystal lattice.
“Eight point four gigajoules of potential energy,” Lin Tao analyzed internally, his breath catching in his throat. If this crystal detonates isotropically, the resulting heat star-fire blast will turn to steam the entire summit of Mount Taiyi, carving a crater three hundred feet deep into the mountain. We can’t smash it with blunt striking force. We must cleave it along its main sight axis. That forced the stored energy to bleed outward into the open sky as aimed heat wave.
