The Grand Jade Escalier stretched upward into the violet stratosphere like a huge white highway built for giants.
Each step was five paces wide and carved from flawless milk-white jadeite. He rose at a thirty-five-degree incline toward the golden pinnacles of the Inner Celestial Citadel. Beneath the semi-clear stone, huge Precursor sight bus channels pulsed with blinding golden light. It hummed with enough high-hum live spark charge to turn to steam a mountain range.
Lin Tao and Tie Shan climbed side by side, their boots ringing in steady, percussive rhythm against the stone.
The air at this height was brutally cold, dipping past forty degrees below zero. Ice crystals formed across their eyebrows and coated the oak wooden handle of Tie Shan’s hammer. But neither man slowed his pace. The hard effort of the steep climb kept their core heat levels raised, their breath venting in thick, timed together plumes of white mist.
Three thousand steps above them, standing on the broad landing of the grand pavilion, Archon Xuan Ji looked down with wild, bloodshot eyes.
The Grand Warden of the Sandbox was no longer the calm, immortal sovereign who had stood above Lin Tao in the white void.
His billowing robes of stitched sky silk were charred black along the hem, shredded by the violent back-electromotive surge that had accompanied the overseer-core’s total collapse. His tall golden crown sat crooked atop his matted hair. A thin line of dried golden blood trailed from his left nostril down across his…
