The hum of the underground data center was turning into a death rattle.
Across the five-mile cave, the ten thousand glowing emerald steles flickered like dying buzzing white tubes in an abandoned parking garage.
The oily black vines of the Nether-Deep pit pulsed with bloated, sickening rhythms, burrowing deeper into the carved jade data channels.
Wherever the vines tightened, ancient glyphs turned to gray sludge.
Above ground, the consequences were total and immediate.
In the eastern royal capital, thirty million mortals suddenly stopped in the middle of bustling stone avenues. It stared blankly at their hands in dumbfounded confusion. A master swordsmith holding a cherry-red blade over his anvil blinked in horror, unable to remember the cooling formula he had practiced for sixty years. A reigning monarch seated upon his golden dragon throne stared at his diamond scepter, unable to recall the name of his own dynasty, his ancestors, or his heirs.
The collective memory of human great realm was evaporating into the void.
Down in the underground vault, seventy Grandmasters of the Master Teacher Pavilion were clutching their temples, crying out in sheer existential agony as hundreds of years of cultivated wisdom dissolved from their minds.
