Before Lin Tao could begin rewriting the partition routing tables, Tie Shan took a heavy step forward, his massive hand coming to rest against the edge of the jade stone stand.
The giant’s eyes were fixed on the glowing runic lattice floating in the air. For all his quiet stoicism, Tie Shan was a man who remembered his bloodline. The ages of quarry slaves who had broken stone under the whips of overseers, dying in dark tunnels without ever seeing their names recorded in an honorable genealogy. His ancestors had been treated as disposable tools by the sect masters and royal tax collectors alike.
“Lin Tao,” Tie Shan said, his voice unusually thick. “My clan. Are they in the stone?”
Lin Tao looked up, meeting the giant’s dark, searching eyes.
“We’ll look,” Lin Tao said softly.
He directed his test probe to query the clan lineage tables of the ancient western mountains, searching for the unique physical bone-thickness signed name that defined the Iron-Bone constitution. The search query rippled through the relational lattice, scanning backward across twelve hundred years of suppressed records.
A moment later, an isolated data block emerged from the depths of the fourth sub-volume.
Lin Tao’s test lens swelled the quarantined block.
