Beyond the Hall of Ten Thousand Stelae lay the true inner sanctum of the cosmos: the Singularity Well.
The floor of polished silver-steel fell away fully, replaced by a circular mid-air bridge forged from star-white-gold roof beams that spanned an open ball-shaped void three miles wide. At the sharp-angled center of this huge sphere hung the star-core itself. Stripped of the outer holding rings, the naked gravity well appeared as a sphere of pitch-black nothingness, four hundred paces in width, framed by a blazing bright slow buildup disk of swirling starlight that spun at ninety percent of light-speed.
The light from the slow buildup disk didn’t light up the chamber evenly.
It bent and twisted in sickening, non-Euclidean curves, warped by the huge gravity pull into nested rings of sight distortion. Looking across the deep gap, Lin Tao could see the far wall of the chamber reflected four times. Once above, once below, and twice mirrored in the shimmering ripples of the photon sphere.
The physical strain on human biology was immediate and severe.
Soon as they stepped onto the star-white-gold mid-air bridge. Then, Lin Tao felt an intense pressure build behind his eyes. His inner ear rebelled against the conflicting gravity vectors. The horizon seemed to plunge downward at a forty-five-degree angle while at the same time rising to meet his chin. Beside him, three of the quarry masters stumbled. He dropped to their knees on the bridge grating as violent nausea seized their stomachs.
