The leak was located two inches below the left elbow.
It didn’t bleed red. It bled pale violet sparks that sizzled against the greasy hair of Lin Ke’s forearm. It smelled of scorched resin and static electricity.
Every time his heart pulsed, a tiny jolt of ungrounded spiritual pressure spiked along his outward channel, causing his left ring finger to burst wildly against the workbench. The feedback shock from the dark rock stele’s boundary ward had exceeded the load-bearing limit of his Vitreous Glass Spirit veins.
A hairline fissure. A micro-fracture in the waveguide.
Lin Ke kicked the heavy oak door of his drafting shed shut. He dropped the iron drop-bar into its iron cradles with a solid thud.
The shed was four paces wide, smelling of dried ink, animal fat candles, and machine oil. In the center of the wooden frame stand table lay the scrap paper he had buffered from the stele. Fifty-four ancient glyphs, held in temporary memory like raw twin dumped from a damaged storage sector.
He sat on the three-legged stool, rested his trembling left arm on the oilcloth, and closed his eyes.
The mental workspace unfolded in sharp, monochrome wireframes.
