A copper needle of cold fire stabbed straight through Lin Ke’s right wrist.
The pain was not a dull ache. It was the sharp, sound snap of over-torqued glass shearing against bone. It was followed by an immediate spray of hot crimson mist beneath the surface of his skin.
His forearm swelled three tiny fractions of an inch in half a breath. The outward spirit vein—a rigid, glassy waveguide with zero living stretch—shuddered as uncontained spiritual energy backed up behind the blockage like steam trapped in a dead-end lead pipe.
He had hit the physical ceiling of Qi Gathering Realm Nine.
There was simply no more storage capacity left in his mortal frame. Every surrounding breath drew raw, raw outside Qi into channels already loaded to ninety-eight point four percent of load-bearing yield strength.
Memory leak, Lin Ke thought, his jaw clenching until the enamel groaned. The intake buffer has no free registers. If I don’t vent the differential within five seconds, the entire forelimb blows out.
He dropped his chin, breathing in short, shallow sips to minimize oxygen consumption. In his thirty-eight years as a public works disaster recovery engineer back on Earth, an unhandled buffer overflow meant a dead daemon and a pager alert. Here, an unhandled overflow meant sweeping his own shredded tendons off the dark rock floor.
