CLACK!
The man-made white jade shard locked into the main waveguide socket with the definitive, ground-shaking finality of an iron gate dropping into its stone groove.
For a heartbeat of terrifying, breathless stillness, the spinning star-white-gold spindle seemed to hesitate. Its ear-splitting fourteen-hundred-RPM shriek dropped half an octave, grinding with the sound of a millstone catching on an unbending diamond pebble.
Then, the world turned cerulean blue.
From the base of the white jade shard, a blinding blast wave of azure light erupted, racing upward through the high-voltage quartz channel and downward into the bronze housing. The sickly, blood-red soft glow that had choked the chamber for three days was wildly swept away, replaced by a blazing bright, crystal-clear azure that smelled of fresh ozone, melting snow, and cold mountain granite.
Inside the waveguide housing, the poisoned payload hit the signal stream.
The thirty-two-bit checksum validator accepted the altered data block without a single warning flag!
To the self-running spreading algorithms of the Grand Sovereign Relay Tower, the poisoned payload appeared 100% authentic. Signed, sealed, and checked with the exact remainder of the original sky mandate. The signal spindle right away prioritized the incoming block, routing the altered instructions down through the six main underground waveguides.
