Ten thousand leagues above the southern rift, on the crystal-clear Cloud Ridge of the Upper Heavens, the sky was not white.
It was an endless, shimmering canopy of azure and spun gold. Floating palaces of white jade drifted upon banks of frozen mist, connected by mid-air bridges forged of sky brass. Giant cloud-skiffs adorned with royal banners patrolled the high-sky currents, their bronze hulls humming with holding runes. Beneath the soaring terrace of the Central Array Bastion, a massive black glass sphere hovered thirty paces above the stone courtyard, anchored by eight giant stone cold-iron chains.
Inside that black glass sphere lay the Cosmic Sandbox—and Subject Null.
Standing upon the command balcony of the Central Array Bastion, High Archon Xuan Ji paced with mounting agitation. His seven-dragon jade crown clinked softly as he turned, his golden eyes fixed on the glowing jade basin that served as the main monitoring console for the quarantine array.
Within the basin, the sacred array runes were not glowing with calm, azure harmony.
They were flickering with wild, violet sparks. The tracking data displayed an alarming spike in internal bus contention, execution pipeline stalls, and abnormal cache line thrashing. The overseer-core executing the quarantine thread was running at ninety-eight percent load, bottlenecked by millions of risky branch mispredictions.
