The Primary Boardroom did not smell like a forest or even a mountain; it smelled of expensive paper and the sterile, ozone tang of a server room. The mahogany table stretched for what felt like miles, and the shadow at the head of it—the flickering, distorted image of Silas—dissolved into a cloud of gold dust as Elara approached. It had been a decoy, a last-ditch effort by the System to distract her heart, but Elara’s violet eyes didn't even blink. She kept walking, her bare feet silent on the scrolling text of the floor, until the boardroom walls themselves began to peel away like old wallpaper. Behind the mahogany and the leather chairs was the true heart of the High Dimension: The Golden Eye.
It was a massive, shifting sphere of light that pulsed with the rhythm of a billion heartbeats
