The clockwork screaming that had filled the Nine Springs round hall stopped with shocking, total suddenness.
The violent a deep hum overclock hum collapsed back to the ancient a deep hum carrier wave of the world engine. High above in the black diamond dome, the falling debris ceased. The suspended green jade rings smoothed out their uneven wobble, returning to their slow, heavy, slow counter-opposed orbits above the calm liquid silver lake.
Silence settled over the underworld. A heavy, choking silence broken only by the steady, measured dripping of silver fluid from the reaper’s huge ribs.
Lin Tao and Tie Shan stood on the narrow upkeep cradle beneath the green jade hub. He looked up at the huge machine.
The fallback trap has sprung, Lin Tao analyzed, his left eye decoding the internal status flags of the giant statue. The reaper daemon has abandoned the null-masked mortal sectors. It has loaded the address of Volume 0x0F into its main execution queue. It now registers eighty-two thousand, four hundred active target records waiting for wipe-out.
The nine huge black glass heads froze in mid-air.
Slowly, with terrifying, clockwork smoothness, the nine dragon skulls turned away from the southern mortal provinces. Their hollow eye sockets, which had burned with uneven amber static during the retry storm, now flared with a deep, focused, hungry emerald soul-fire.
