Chapter 482: Tremors from the Earth's Core
On the third day after Knull's death, Earth began to tremble.
It was no ordinary earthquake. The source was not at a plate boundary, in a volcanic belt, or anywhere geology could explain.
It lay at Earth's core, deep within an ocean of liquid iron and nickel heated to over five thousand degrees Celsius.
There, beyond the reach of every instrument humanity possessed, something that had slept for millions of years was waking.
Its body stretched between the inner and outer core. More than thirty kilometers long, it resembled an enormous seed that had yet to fully develop.
A silvery-gray shell, somewhere between metal and stone, covered its surface. Intersecting grooves ran across it.
Those grooves were its blood vessels, nerves, and energy channels.
While it slept, its body had become part of Earth's geological structure.
It drew heat from the core for energy and gathered minerals and elements through the mantle's convection currents. Every breath it took moved in time with Earth's magnetic field.
But now it was moving.
Not consciously. These were the instinctive stirrings before it woke.
It turned over in the core's liquid metal. Just once.
Its shoulder blade struck the boundary between the inner and outer core with a force equivalent to hundreds of millions of Tsar Bombas detonating at once.
A shock wave raced outward from the center of Earth, through the mantle and crust, and burst across the surface.
The floor of the Pacific Ocean split open for thousands of kilometers. Magma poured from the fissure and rapidly cooled in the seawater, forming a new undersea mountain range.
The Japanese Archipelago shifted half a meter west, and a magnitude-nine earthquake struck Tokyo.
Skyscrapers toppled like dominoes. A tsunami swept away everything in the coastal towns.
Volcanoes