The silence hanging over the Desolation of the Nine Pillars was thick, heavy, and unnatural.
Across fifty li of front, the golden wall of the Nine-Dragon Barrier stood like a sheer cliff of cracked fiery black glass. The blinding amber fire that had bathed the northern horizon for thirty thousand years was put out, replaced by a dull, dead sheen that didn’t reflect the pale moonlight. Suspended in the upper thermosphere, the nine golden dragons remained locked in their frozen, spasmodic postures. Huge monuments of dead code hung against the cold stars.
Lin Tao walked forward from Trench Node 32, his boots crunching softly on the scorched chalk.
Beside him walked Tie Shan, his fourteen-pound star-iron pry-bar held balanced at his hip. Behind them, forty paces back, Captain Wu led five hundred heavy infantrymen from the Azure Basin. Their box-shaped star-iron shields were locked in a defensive wall. Every man held his breath, expecting heaven’s wrath to reignite at any moment.
“The air has gone cold,” Tie Shan said, watching his breath plume into the dark.
“The heat-powered engines have stalled,” Lin Tao replied quietly, his voice level and analytical. “When a state machine exhausts every allocated address in its table, it can’t execute its state shifts. It can’t evaluate conditions. It can’t accept input. And it can’t fade heat. The entire system is held in an infinite wait-state.”
