They didn’t go down from the clouds. They materialized as sharp-angled tears in the three-space-folding fabric of space.
Three huge entities hovered fifty paces above the shattered summit platform of the Grand Sovereign Relay Tower. They possessed no human anatomy, no flesh, and no Daoist robes. They were crystal-clear avatars of pure, blinding golden radiance. Twenty-foot-tall polyhedrons of linked, self-folding sharp-angled planes that rotated along twelve spatial axes at the same time.
At the center of each entity burned a single, unblinking sky-slit of cold, white light that emitted no heat, only total, tyrannical power.
The High Celestial Archons.
The ancient, self-running system administrators of the Heavenly Dao.
The air on the platform grew impossibly cold. The surrounding heat plummeted from sixty degrees to minus twenty in five seconds. Frost crystal-hardened across Lin Tao’s canvas coat. His breath froze into white crystals that drifted onto his boots.
A voice rang directly inside Lin Tao’s skull vault.
It wasn’t spoken in Chinese, nor in the ancient court dialect of the emperors. It was a raw, multi-channel carrier broadcast that translated directly into linguistic concepts in his hearing cortex:
