Six hours with a silver razor knife was fine for a lab cutting-open.
It was fully useless in an arena where twenty swordsmen were trying to carve your lungs out, or in an active breakthrough cycle where every heartbeat counted. If Lin Ke had to spend a full shift flaking lead binders. Meanwhile, his dantian vapor was boiling toward a critical blowout, he would be a corpse before the second layer cleared.
They needed a self-running, dynamic runtime filter.
A gearwork that could take an un-modified, toxic Foundation Pill, ingest it whole, and separate the active payload from the malicious DRM in real-time inside the human stomach.
Lin Ke leaned over the low workbench, his eyes fixed on a spool of shimmering, semi-clear thread: Spirit-Mulberry Silk, harvested from the ice-slow larvae of the northern borders, five times stronger than steel wire and naturally resistant to acidic rusting.
Beside the silk sat Shen Yue, her copper-harness safety lock rig strapped to her hands, her brushes freshly loaded with a micro-filtered mid-air of red stone and crushed cobalt steel.
“We can’t perform manual surgery during the tournament,” Lin Ke said, picking up a single strand of the silk. “We need a living capsule. A multi-layered straining sheath.”
