Behind the dark rock megalith, the air was growing thin and freezing. The Nine-Peak Vortex had now tightly packed to a width of barely two hundred paces. It spun with such terrifying ferocity that the sound was no longer metal. But a deep, shaking drone that set the teeth in Lin Tao’s skull humming like tuning forks.
Lin Tao sat cross-legged on the cold flat stone slabs, his medical kit open beside him. He pulled a small leather pouch containing five thimbles of refined Precursor gritty paste—graded diamond dust suspended in purified stone oil—and laid it across his knee.
He drew out his pure-crystal star-white-gold land-mapper needle.
The four-inch metal pen was an extraordinary piece of building, recovered from the underground vaults of the Sovereign Core beneath the Continental Rift. Forged from pure Precursor star-white-gold, its crystal-clear lattice possessed a test bandwidth twelve times greater than ordinary refined jade. Its tip was cut into an eight-sided prism, with eight tiny facets polished to within three nanometers of total flatness.
Lin Tao placed a drop of diamond paste onto the pad of his right index finger and began carefully buffing the third and fourth facets of the needle tip, working in tiny, circular strokes. The gritty paste felt cool and gritty between his skin and the star-white-gold alloy. Under the tiny zoom of his sight HUD, Lin Tao could see the crystal-clear surface smoothing down to sub-nanometer flatness, removing the minute scratches left behind by last diagnostics in the southern vaults.
