At mile four, the chaos of the earth-shaking rift vanished, replaced by an unsettling, giant stone order.
The canyon walls were no longer fractured dark rock and weeping shale. They had been carved into an endless row of stone pillars of huge box-shaped giant pillars, each three hundred paces tall and fifty paces wide. They stood in flawless posture like the pillars of an underground cathedral built for a race of giants.
Between each pillar ran upright channels of polished star-iron. It glowed with faint, rhythmic traces of amber soft glow.
Lin Tao walked along an ancient suspended gallery carved from dark stone, his hand resting against the stone railing. The stone under his palm was cut with tolerances so precise that even after tens of thousands of years of deep-rock shifting, the seams between blocks were invisible to the naked eye.
These are not pillars, Lin Tao realized, his test eye peering into the hairline seams of the stone. These are clip-on server chassis. The Precursors didn’t just place computers inside the mountain. They turned the land-wide bedrock itself into the processing substrate.
Each dark rock monolith was filled with millions of tiny crystal-clear traces, through which spiritual energy—raw heat-powered flux—was cycled, calculated. Then it redirected across the provinces above. But now, those traces were choked with black carbonized melted rock waste and stone deposits, pulsing with an uneven, jittery rhythm.
