The lead-lined land-mapper’s bench looked like a potion-maker’s running table.
Lin Tao had laid out six cold-iron spikes in a six-sided outer edge around the central jade shard. He drove them two inches into the bench’s solid timber core. Between each spike, he had strung braided copper wire harvested from the royal custom pavilion’s lightning rods. He formed a closed Faraday loop that funneled stray magnetic emissions into a heavy iron stake driven five feet into the underground clay beneath the vault.
The raw jade crystal lay unwrapped at the center of the ring.
In the enclosed darkness of the bunker, the shard was mesmerizing. It was sixteen inches of flawless, deep-emerald green jade, perfectly cut into an elongated octahedron. Beneath its glassy surface, billions of tiny circuits woven from spun gold and white-gold thread pulsed with an eerie, rhythmic heartbeat. Every forty-one point six a split second, a wave of pale lavender light traveled from the shard’s base to its apex, venting a whisper of static that caused the hairs on Lin Tao’s forearms to stand on end.
Tie Shan watched from three paces back, his arms crossed over his chest, his eyes narrowed at the humming stone.
“The stone is breathing,” Tie Shan observed, his voice a low rumble.
