The ceiling of the Core Threshold shrine tilted ninety degrees to the left.
Then it inverted.
In the center of Lu Chen’s skull, the physical world had lost its shape. The nine counter-rotating blood-fire suns spinning inside his lower belly were generating contradictory gravity vectors, each one pulling his nerve map points toward a different point in space.
His vestibular system collapsed into non-Euclidean chaos.
He saw his own ribs floating twenty paces outside his chest. The solid dark rock floor felt like a sheet of stretched pig bladder suspended over an infinite drop. He tried to draw breath. Then, his brain registered that his mouth was behind his ears, swallowing black starlight from an impossible angle.
This was the fatal snare of the higher realms.
Human mind had evolved over millions of years to survive in three flat dimensions, guided by a single downward pull of terrestrial gravity. Mortal flesh was never built to serve as the sky hub for nine gyroscopic stars.
If the dizziness persisted for another six heartbeats, his divine sense would fracture. His brain cortex would tear itself to pieces trying to reconcile nine different down directions at once. That left his physical meat a drooling, braindead husk sitting over an uncontrolled fire core.
