The light was not visual. It was heat, water-pressure, and blinding.
When the ancient dam burst inside the lower intake pipe hub, the air in Sub-Vault Zero didn’t simply warm up. It spark-charged instantly into a howling hurricane of high-pressure azure star-fire.
The sound was an unbroken, screaming wall of sound feedback that tore through the ears like hot needles.
Lin Ke stood in the dead center of the eight-sided white jade staging bed.
Before he could take a single retreating stride, the surrounding pressure slope in the room spiked past one hundred and fifty kilopascals—more than three times the maximum load-bearing rating of a Qi Gathering 8th Layer fighter.
His hemp tunic shredded from his shoulders, the coarse cloth vaporizing into grey ash before the fabric hit the stone.
Across his bare chest, thousands of tiny blood vessels burst at the same time under the surrounding water-pressure shear, painting his skin in a violent, crimson wash of under-skin bruising. His Vitreous Glass Spirit veins groaned, shaking at their total ringing limit, their rigid, non-elastic walls glowing bright violet through his flesh like lit up neon tubes.
Deadly intake flood, Lin Ke diagnosed, his lungs refusing to take in oxygen as the super-dense spiritual gas crushed his chest muscle flat against his spine. Total outside over-pressure.
