The green light from the blinking slate cursor reflected off Lin Ke’s bloodshot eyeballs.
His broken third and fourth fingers pulsed with a deep, sickening throb against his ribs inside the cedar splint. Every ragged heartbeat sent sharp, crystal-clear twinges shooting through his Vitreous Glass Spirit veins (Bing-Mai). The tiny stress fractures along his chest channels grated like ground glass against his lung lining, reminding him that beneath the intellectual shock of the precursor ruins, his living meat was hanging on by a thread.
The dry, sterile air of the vault sucked moisture from his cracked lips, tasting faintly of iron oxide, ozone, and old limestone dust.
Back in Ward Seven, Apothecary He’s grumpy voice rattled in his memory: “You stare into dark holes long enough, boy. You forget your blood is pooling in your boots! Check your pulse before your heart turns to lard!”
Lin Ke pressed two fingers against his main neck blood vessel. Eighty-eight beats per minute, shallow, thread-like, but stable. Real injuries had no undo command. Every tiny fraction of an inch of bone shifted weight in his hand would have to be set and plastered the slow, living way.
ENTER COMMAND: _
Eleven thousand years of uptime.
