Beneath the glowing green glowing display, Lin Tao located the physical screen port.
It wasn’t a mystical keyhole designed for a royal jade seal, nor was it a spiritual altar requiring blood sacrifices or refined spiritual pills. It was a recessed six-sided dock, exactly nine tiny fractions of an inch in width and four inches deep, milled from solid star-white-gold with tolerances so fine that not a single dust mote could penetrate the seam.
Lin Tao raised his land-mapper metal pen to eye level, rotating the six-sided shaft between his calloused thumb and forefinger.
The dimensions were matching.
The four-inch land-mapper metal pen—the tool he had salvaged from the collapsed Precursor transit channel during his first week as an indentured slave in the quarries of Sector Four, the tool he had used to measure stone blocks, tap array lines, and ground spark arcs across twenty seasons—was not an ordinary land-mapper’s pin. It was an authentic Precursor hardware debugging probe, designed specifically to screen with the upkeep ports of the world-size running system.
In the dim dust of the quarry tunnels twenty seasons ago, Lin Tao had coughed up stone grit and blood. He grabbed this very piece of cold metal while overseers cracked ox-hide whips above his head.
