Pica took the blueprints, his shrill voice squeezing out of his rocklike body. "Understood."
He crouched and pressed his palm against the ** ground.
The next second, the earth began to **.
A rumble surged up from deep underground. Soil churned, and layers of rock arched like the backs of waking beasts.
Stone pillars burst from the earth, twisting, stretching, and linking together in midair.
Walls grew along invisible axes, domes closed amid the rumbling, and towers pointed skyward like suddenly bared fangs.
Within just a few breaths, a forbidding fortress stood on the wasteland-a silent colossus of stacked stone whose shadow nearly swallowed the coastline.
Jora stepped forward.
Her paintbrush traced an arc of light through the air, sending flecks of radiance drifting toward the gray-white building on the wind.
"Time to give you a change of clothes."
She spoke softly.
The brush tip swept through the air, splashing black, white, red, yellow, green, blue... all kinds of colors along its path onto the enormous stone ramparts.
Layer upon layer of vivid color rapidly covered the cold, somber military fortress, gradually turning it into a strange, colorful building that seemed to have been lifted straight from a storybook.
Living in spaces wrapped in these colors, people would unconsciously become more spirited, their thoughts would move faster, and even their bodies seemed to feel a little lighter.
This slow, sustained influence of a special ability was almost imperceptible to people like Rossi and the others, but for researchers like Dr. Tieshidaino, who focused on the mind rather than the body, it was a necessary support.
Unless, one day, the doctor completely abandoned the limitations of flesh and blood and transformed himself entirely into a creation of metal and circuitry. Then, naturally, he would no longer need such external assistance.
"That