The high-hum whine shining from the sixty-foot sky monolith was no longer a sound shaking. It had become a physical assault on local reality.
Inside the Six-sided Round hall of Sage Hearing, the air pressure spiked to twelve sea-weights. The sky-blue star-crystal, which had preserved the sacred pedagogical records of the Jiuzhou Plane for ten thousand years, was now pulsing with an angry, blinding strobe of pure bright purple and sun-hot white light.
At 99%, the spinning golden hourglass had stopped rotating. It was wildly shuddering in place, pixelating and fragmenting into jagged shards of corrupted sky code.
Frank stood on the dais, his open palm still resting against the scorching crystal surface. He squinted through his eyelashes at the flickering display, shaking his head in deep disgust.
“Look at this,” Frank grumbled, his voice barely heard over the roaring turbine whine of the crystal. “Classic junior dev mistake. You ran a SELECT ALL query across an unindexed four-petabyte storehouse without a WHERE clause. You forgot to set a timeout limit on the client connection. Now your thread pool is deadlocked, your garbage collector is thrashing. Your CPU is baking like a potato in a bonfire.”
Across his HUD, the system test flashed in alarming crimson and amber borders, scrolling error stacks faster than mortal eyes could follow.
