The chamber didn’t feel like the inside of a mountain. It felt like the inside of a dying star ship buried under the crust of the earth.
The vaulted processing cathedral stretched for two full miles into the underground gloom, its ceiling soaring four hundred paces overhead. Supporting that impossible to understand weight of earth-shaking rock were three hundred massive stone towers of polished black dark rock, each sixty paces square and rising like black glass skyscrapers toward the stone roof.
Between these towers hung webbed mid-air bridges of woven star-iron, suspended by braided gold-silver metal cables the thickness of ancient temple pillars.
Lin Tao walked slowly across the glassy white floor, his boots clicking with crisp deep ring against the glass-smooth flat stone slabs. The material beneath their feet was neither jade nor marble. It was pure-crystal quartz fused under millions of sea-weights of pressure, embedded with tiny gold logic pathways that flickered with dying, intermittent sparks of pale violet light.
Beside him, Tie Shan held his fourteen-pound star-iron pry-bar diagonally across his chest, his dark eyes scanning the huge towers with hungry caution. The giant moved with deliberate, heavy strides, his thick neck rotating as he tracked the vast shape of the Precursor installation.
