The bronze doors did not swing open; they dissolved.
The heavy, groaning metal broke down into thousands of glowing data streams that cascaded into the glass floor, revealing the true heart of the Lower Celestial Administration.
If the antechamber had been designed to make ascendants feel small, the inner Sanctum was designed to make them realize they were entirely irrelevant. It was not a room. It was a localized dimension, a sprawling, vertical city of floating platforms, geometric towers, and rivers of liquid mana that flowed upward instead of down. The sky was a terrifying, infinite grid of golden lines, each one tracking the real-time status of a billion different lives across a hundred different worlds.
This was the Bureau of Planetary Trials.
And it was currently in a state of absolute, synchronized panic.
