Beyond the hundred-ton bronze and black glass portals, the inside of the central processing vault unfolded before them in staggering, giant stone scale.
An underground round hall, five hundred paces across, opened beneath a vaulted dome of natural black diamond that reflected the eerie pale-green eerie glow of the underworld. Suspended in mid-air above a vast lake of calm liquid silver were three nested rings of semi-clear white green jade, each ring twenty paces thick and rotating in counter-opposed orbits. Deep within the center of the rotating rings, suspended by invisible magnetic flux, floated a massive stone pillar of star-white-gold—the Nine Springs Registry Core.
The hum shaking through the air was ear-splitting, cycling at the unchanging a deep hum clock pulse that governed all physical reality.
Lin Tao stepped onto the suspended narrow high walkway that spanned the liquid silver pool, his iron-toed boots ringing like church bells against the punched holes in star-iron grating. The air was bone-dry and sub-zero, carrying zero dust or sky moisture. The heat gauge in his test vision hovered at twenty-two degrees below zero. But the liquid silver eighty-four meters below remained perfectly fluid, kept in ceaseless motion by magnetic power-coil fields pulsing from the foundation bedrock. Along the sheer walls of the round hall, thick cold-iron bus cables hung like stone-hard vines, channeling millions of current units of static-electric potential into the earth.
