Walking across an invisible floor was a painful exercise in psychological endurance.
With every stride forward, Lin Tao’s boots landed on solid, unbending Precursor alloy. But his eyes insisted he was floating fifteen thousand arm-lengths above an infinite void. Beside him, Tie Shan moved with slow, deliberate steps. He held his fourteen-pound star-iron pry-bar horizontally before his waist like a tightrope walker’s balancing pole.
The giant’s breathing was heavy and ragged, his weathered face bathed in cold sweat.
“Don’t look down, Tie Shan,” Lin Tao reminded him gently. “Keep your gaze on my traveling coat.”
“Hard to ignore the empty,” Tie Shan rasped through clenched teeth. “My boots want to drop.”
“Your boots are grounded,” Lin Tao said. “The crash plane is twelve feet wide. We’re walking dead along the centerline.”
Lin Tao used his land-mapper metal pen as an active feeler gauge.
Every three paces, he tapped the pure-crystal star-white-gold micro-needle against the invisible surface beneath their feet. The needle’s test tracking data returned an instant readout of the local crash normal vector: [0.0, 1.0, 0.0]. The surface was flat, unwarped, and fully free of load-bearing micro-fissures.
