Standing atop the windswept ridge of Boundary Pylon Three, Lin Tao closed his eyes, filtering out the howling mountain gale to focus entirely on the microvolt shakes singing through the steel metal pen in his right palm.
To traditional fighters, comms magic charms were mystical miracles. Strips of spirit-infused paper inscribed by Daoist masters with sacred blood-glyphs, flying across vast distances on invisible winds of heavenly intention. They believed that divine fate guided the scroll to its recipient, sealed by the will of the heavens.
To Lin Tao, a comms magic charm was simply an unshielded radio-hum transceiver running on a low-hum carrier wave of fourteen point two kilohertz.
In the early decades of network stonework on Earth, early protocols had operated under the naive assumption that all physical wire was secure. Engineers had sent clear-text passwords, credit transactions, and routing tables over unshielded twisted-pair cables, never imagining that a high-flow pushback magnetic-pull clamp could sniff the entire data stream without dropping a single packet.
Here, in this decaying training cosmos, the principle was matching. The ancient Precursor engineers who designed the comms substrate had built the network on high-speed copper bus lines integrated into the land-wide ley-lines. But over hundreds of years of decay, the Azure Cloud Sect’s illiterate formation masters had replaced damaged fiber channels with cheap silver red stone paper. It used brute spiritual energy to blast analog signals through the open air without a shred of encryption or packet validation.
