The immediate danger of total land-wide total ruin had passed. But the physical laws of heat laws were not yet done collecting their debt.
Lin Tao knelt upon the scorched dark rock flat stone slabs of the apex platform, his breathing ragged and shallow as the fight-or-flight rush that had sustained his nervous system began to leach away. His hands were shaking with uncontrollable, fine tremors. He slowly turned his palms upward into the dimming surrounding light. Then, he saw that both palmar arches were covered in second-degree heat burns. The skin raised in pale, fluid-filled blisters where blasting heat from the fifty-million-ampere arc had cooked the skin layers through his coarse linen sleeves.
The pain was excruciating. That searing fire radiated up both outward nerves into his elbows and neck.
A wave of intense, sickening dizziness washed through Lin Tao’s brain cortex.
His vision doubled, the dark six-sided column of the Apex Pillar splitting into two shimmering, semi-clear silhouettes that swayed sickeningly against the background of the ceiling dome. His inner ear screamed with the phantom roar of the dead star-fire column. A high-pitched tinnitus tone—a sharp sound hum of four thousand hertz—drilled into his time lobes like a cold steel needle.
