The center of the cosmos didn’t look like the golden jade pavilions described in ancient sky scriptures.
There were no immortal maidens playing zithers upon drifting purple clouds, nor were there nine-clawed golden dragons coiling about pillars of blazing bright spirit jade. Beyond the shattered inner walls of the High Archon Citadel, across the void where the physical fabric of the nine heavens met its origin, stretched a machine of impossible to understand, giant stone scale. A ring of dark silver-steel-hardened carbon-iron, broad enough to cradle a hundred land-wide landmasses within its inner curve, rotated in heavy, slow silence around a solitary point of blinding white light.
The star-core at the heart of the ring burned with pure, unbending soft glow. Not fire, not spiritual radiance, but the naked striking force of matter tightly packed to infinite thickness, held in unending check by magnetic holding rings of cold-forged Precursor alloy.
Lin Tao stood at the edge of the threshold raised stone road, the hem of his dark traveling cloak whipping against his calves in the thin, spark-charged slipstream of the void. Beside him, Tie Shan rested his fourteen-pound star-iron pry-bar against his right shoulder, the banded star-white-gold sleeves along its shaft glinting under the glare of the central star. Behind them stood twelve veteran quarry masters from Mount Taiyi, their coarse linen tunics stained with grease and rock dust. They carried forged sledgehammers and coils of heavy hemp thick ship rope.
