Inside the white void, the floor shook with a sudden, violent shudder.
CLANG.
The sound blast traveling through the silicon substrate was ear-splitting—the clear ring of Tie Shan’s star-iron totem colliding with sky bronze at point-blank range. The shaking was so intense that Lin Tao’s chalk marks danced across the floor, scattering fine white dust into the dry air.
Lin Tao knelt in the center of his probe array. His land-mapper metal pen was held rock-steady in his right hand.
“He’s on the bridge,” Lin Tao whispered, his pulse surging with grim satisfaction. “The outside array is distracted.”
Tie Shan’s moving assault had drawn the attention of the host overseer-core’s security daemons. In the Celestial Citadel, the office threads were wildly dedicating compute cycles to external defense. That left the internal memory bus fully unmonitored.
It was the golden window Lin Tao had been waiting for.
He took his brass tuning fork and struck it with maximum force against his iron boot heel. The brass rang out with an intense, piercing a deep hum tone that shook through his jawbone, setting his internal pocket watch into motion.
