The darkness that wrapped around the Processing Cathedral was total, velvety, and deep.
For three seconds, the heartbeat of the world ceased to exist. The thirty-thousand-year hum of the dark rock server stacks fell fully silent. The roaring currents of turquoise salt water in the floor trenches halted in zero-drag frozen stillness. The spark-charged static that had made the hair on Lin Tao’s forearms stand on end collapsed into a dead spark void.
Beside Lin Tao on the black glass dais, Tie Shan leaned back against the fractured stone railing, his breath misting in the freezing gloom.
The giant didn’t move, his broad hand resting lightly upon his fourteen-pound pry-bar. “Quiet now.”
“The system is flushing its registers,” Lin Tao whispered into the dark. His voice carried clearly across the two-mile chamber. “Every share-out held by the dead patriarchs is being evicted from the main tables. Thirty thousand years of hoarded spiritual debt is collapsing in a single cycle.”
In database cluster operations, Lin Tao analyzed. He watched the green eerie-glowing traces return to the edges of his vision, a mass purge is never gentle. When you release fifty-five peta-runes of tightly packed potential energy, the system doesn’t gently distribute the fluid. It surges like an exploded dam seeking balance.
