Every breath of mountain air scraped Lin Ke’s throat pipe like coarse emery cloth.
The sense bandwidth of his newly compiled nervous system was overwhelming. The sound shaking of a beetle burrowing through pine bark fifty paces away sounded like a carpenter’s rasp. The scent of spilled iron ore and drying blood was a dense, choking cloud. The sunlight striking his newly glass-fused skin felt like millions of shaking needle points.
His physical body was running in an untuned, cold-boot state.
Lin Ke froze in place at the rim of the black glass crater, deliberately suppressing his living reflexes. In software, when a newly patched cluster boots into production, you don’t right away hammer it with benchmark traffic. You let the memory caches warm up.
He closed his eyes and began his internal Post-Incident Review.
The diagnostics were unambiguous.
His core stonework was solid—the heat-proof glass waveguides were running at five nines of reliability. But the living meat around the glass was starving and battered. If he sprinted, fought, or circulated high-speed Qi before the newly sintered glassy channels fully heat-softened, heat stress would introduce micro-fissures along his joints.
He needed forty-eight hours of total body-energy frozen stillness, zero martial load, and massive heat replenishment.
