The marble steps of the Grand Octagonal Dais were slick with condensed mountain mist, stone oil. The cold, unrushed reality of mortal physics.
Archon Xuan Ming dragged his left leg forward. His iron greave scraped against the white stone with a harsh, grating screech that set his teeth on edge. Every inch of his diamond-inlaid armor—crafted by immortal artisans to gleam like the morning sun—now felt like an eighty-pound cage of solid lead strapped to his shoulders, ribs, and thighs. His lower-back bones tightly packed with a sickening, dull ache. It sent sharp pulses of pain down his sciatic nerve every time his boot touched stone.
For three thousand years, Xuan Ming had lived without the sensation of weight.
Sky fighters of the Archon rank didn’t walk upon the earth as mortals did. They rode the subtle static-electric floating fields kept by the Board’s underground bus lines. Their bodies had never learned to balance mass against gravity, never developed the dense, stringy tendon sheaths needed to stabilize heavy joints, and never felt the burning muscle burn that pooled in mortal muscle fibers after twenty seconds of hard effort. Without their self-running life-support feeds, their cardiovascular systems struggled to pump blood to their hands and feet. That left their fingertips numb and their lips tinted a pale, sickly violet.
