The Golden Quarantine Cage dropped upon the summit platform like an avalanche of solid sunlight.
Lin Tao didn’t run. There was nowhere to run on a twelve-hundred-foot spire, and one couldn’t outrun a speed-of-light spatial share-out command.
He stood in the center of the shattered platform, his boots planted firmly upon the frost-covered marble. Beneath his feet, he could feel the faint, rhythmic shakes of Tie Shan and the tunnel diggers dropping safely through the lower tiers of the tower. They had cleared the blast zone. Doctor Su was waiting in the water plenum with clean linen, hot salt water, and bone splints. And four hundred million mortal lives were waking up into an unmonitored sunrise.
His mission in the Middle Imperial Ring was finished.
The four walls of the golden cage slammed into the stone platform fifty paces wide, cutting off the wind, the smell of ozone, and the distant roar of the Dragon River.
Inside the cage, physical reality began to dissolve.
The marble floor beneath his boots lost its thickness, turning into a flat, gray wireframe mesh that extended into an infinite, featureless horizon. The blue morning sky vanished, replaced by a dark, starless empty pocket ruled by towering columns of glowing green hex-code.
