The command cut through the freezing midnight air like a cold-chisel striking iron.
Across three miles of earthworks and fifty li of jagged mountain front, the sound signaling wires snapped into clockwork release. Ten thousand star-iron levers dropped in perfect phase lock. Ten thousand velvet-covered paddles swung back from polished red copper concavities. He exposed ten thousand curved mirrors to the cold, unnatural amber glare streaming from the upper thermosphere.
For an instant, the world seemed to hold its breath.
Then came the flash.
It wasn’t a scattered scattering of surrounding light. Captured, packed, and focused by ten thousand curved plates, the reflected light coalesced into one hundred and twenty-eight blinding lances of clear amber heat wave. The beams crossed the three hundred paces of barren chalk at three hundred thousand miles per second. It struck the sight intake sky-slits of the Nine-Dragon Barrier at the exact heartbeat of the twenty-four-hertz frame shift.
High above the Desolation of the Nine Pillars, the sky ignited with an eye-searing, blazing bright fury.
Lin Tao stood atop the command stronghold, his land-mapper metal pen gripped tightly in his right hand. The intense wash of back-scattered light lit up every line and contour of his pale, scarred face. Beside him, Tie Shan held his fourteen-pound star-iron pry-bar grounded firmly between his boots. His dark eyes were wide as the northern heavens seemed to tear open into sheets of raw white fire.
