The alarm didn’t sound like a royal horn or a temple bell.
It was a sound terror weapon engineered by ancient great realms to incapacitate living lifeforms. A harsh, timed together square-wave siren screamed from thousands of hidden resonators embedded in the dark rock ceiling, cycling through frequencies between four hundred and twelve thousand hertz with ear-splitting, bone-shaking violence.
Lin Tao’s ears pulsed with acute agony. He jammed wax plugs into both ears, the damp linen he had prepared in his satchel cutting the sound assault by half.
Beside the stairs, Tie Shan shook his head like a wounded bull. His jaw clamped was tight, his eyes fixed on the central reactor shaft fifty paces ahead.
In database cluster administration, Lin Tao thought, his test vision cutting through the sound shaking, when you try to drop a production database partition holding the credentials of the system administrators, the self-running intrusion prevention system doesn’t open a support ticket. It drops the hammer.
The fifty-pace opening of the central reactor shaft began to vomit blinding columns of spark-charged, purple-black star-fire.
The floor beneath their feet didn’t merely vibrate. It tilted. A heavy gravity zone distortion was pulling the air, the dust. The shattered flakes of quartz toward the lip of the pit. Loose pieces of iron melted rock waste tumbled upward, levitating three feet off the ground before speeding up toward the center of the room.
