The descent from the Middle Ring castle walls took Lin Tao and Tie Shan directly into the heart of the northern refugee quarter.
The crimson haze had thickened since noon. It hung in the unmoving air like a fine mid-air of crushed red stone, refracting the sunlight until shadows ceased to possess sharp edges. Every wagon, pavilion, and walking laborer cast a muddy, double dark shape that wavered whenever the sky pulse washed through the valley.
Lin Tao walked with measured, deliberate strides. His left sight lens kept a nonstop scan, calculating the cycle period and ringing wave height of the surrounding wave.
The carrier pulse operated at a rigid interval. Exactly twenty-four frames per second, timed together to the world-size core’s baseline clock. But every twelfth second, an extended exact timing burst occurred. A sixty-split-second blackout that seized the nervous systems of every living organism tuned to surrounding spiritual deep ring.
“Mother?” a child’s voice called out from beneath an oiled canvas awning.
Lin Tao paused near the mouth of a narrow alley. A young boy of seven or eight stood beside a boiling cooking pot of barley gruel, tugging wildly at the hemp sleeve of a kneeling woman. The woman was holding a wooden ladle suspended directly over the rising steam. Her eyes were wide, fixed on the stone hearth, unblinking and vacant.
