The Vault Gate of the Southern Continental Core stood before them like a black mountain carved into the shape of a doorway.
It rose a hundred paces into the underground gloom. It was built from seamless blocks of polished black green jade and banded with bands of star-iron as wide as city avenues. Across its surface ran thousands of linked nested circles, each carved with tiny logic runes that glowed with a deep, pulsating crimson light—the universal warning color of an active quarantine lockdown.
Here, at the total bottom of the Continental Rift, the heat was choking.
The air was dense, thick with magnetic tension that made the hair on Lin Tao’s forearms stand on end. Every breath burned the throat with the metal tang of high-voltage ionization. Great columns of dark rock flanked the entryway, carved with deep channels through which pale glowing fluid trickled like stale blood. It wept from damaged channels high in the vaulted cave ceiling.
In running systems stonework, Lin Tao thought. He looked at the massive portal, the kernel gate doesn’t yield to brute physical force. You can’t smash an office gate with a hammer. The system will simply invoke an exception handler and turn to steam the caller with quarantine lightning.
