The hum was musical, steady, and lethal.
Beneath the white jade floor of Sub-Vault Zero, sixty tons of high-pressure ancient Qi were now cycling through the cleared bronze channels in an unbroken, smooth-flowing loop. But atop the central control stone stand, the blinking stone cursor had frozen.
Replacing the cursor was a single, crimson glyph carved into the black glass:
A crimson skull enclosed in a three-toothed gear.
The work-yard’s security layer was running an unpatched version of the First Dynastic Access Protocol. Because neither Lin Ke, Meng Shan, nor Shen Yue possessed an old family blood-token from the founding elders, the array’s logic had placed the entire eight-sided water drops bed into a self-running execution lock.
If any unlisted living fighter stepped onto the jade platform to begin a Foundation breakthrough, the array’s control circuits would interpret them as a foreign intrusion.
The system wouldn’t equalize their internal pressure. It would invert the grounding channels, pumping forty sea-weights of raw counter-current straight into their dantian, turning their internal organs into mist.
“We have to turn it off,” Shen Yue whispered. Her small hands shook as she applied cold willow-bark paste to the burns on Lin Ke’s forearms. “Lin Ke, look at that red glyph. The elders locked the gate three hundred years ago. If we can’t unlock it, we can’t use the room.”
