The saber steel held the cold of an open slaughterhouse.
Checker Lu didn’t draw the blade all the way. He merely thumbed the crossguard forward. That let two inches of azure-hardened steel catch the dying red embers of Furnace Four. The spiritual pressure of a Qi Gathering 8th Layer judge rolled out like a draft of mountain sleet, flattening the swirling dust between them.
Lin Ke’s blistered right hand throbbed inside his sleeve, the raw deep skin sticking to coarse hemp.
“Article 14,” Lu repeated. He stepped forward until the crunch of fire gravel beneath his boots matched the rhythm of a funeral drum. “Secret physical tampering with an old family scripture stele. The penalty isn’t fifty lashes, slave. It’s immediate spirit vein severance and twenty years in the copper mines.”
Lin Ke didn’t back away. In a network partition, you didn’t pull cables blindly. You checked routing tables.
Behind his eyes, the Tian Fu booted with zero latency.
In the test model, Lin Ke bolted toward the narrow gap between the ore carts. Try one.
Lu didn’t chase. He flicked his wrist. A crescent of tightly packed wind-Qi sliced through the dark at Mach 1.5, severing Lin Ke’s left collar bone and pinning his shoulder to the timber inner wall. Massive internal hemorrhaging followed. Death arrived in forty-two seconds.
