The upward transit of the liberated current didn’t follow human roads or royal courier routes.
It raced along the ancient Precursor bus lines. The massive, tree-thick braided gold-silver metal cables Lin Tao and Tie Shan had seen hanging in the sheer dark rock chasms of the Continental Rift. For three thousand years, those lines had carried only a trickle of choked, contaminated energy, their heat padding baking in dry heat. Meanwhile, the mountain roots starved.
Now, they carried the full, unmetered flood of a rejuvenated continent.
Five miles above the cathedral, in the upright throat of the Continental Rift, the transformation was instant and terrifying.
Great rivers of liquid sapphire light surged through the gold-silver metal channels, lighting up the dark fiery cliffs with the bright glare of noonday. The ammonia-scented chemical fog that had filled the deep gap for hundreds of years was instantly swept away by a huge, climbing heat draft. White-hot steam collided with the sub-zero salt water vapors. It condensed into an amazing underground rain that fell upon the dark rock ledges in cool, fragrant torrents.
In signal line building, Lin Tao calculated. His test senses tracked the climbing wavefront through the bedrock, when clean current fills an earlier starved grid, the first flow pushback mismatch creates a ringing standing wave. The hum doesn’t shatter the rock. It tunes the rock.
