The silence inside Lin Ke’s chest was total.
It wasn’t a peaceful stillness. It was the terrifying, sudden cessation of the living pump that had sustained Colin Shaw across two lives and thirty-eight years of disaster recovery building.
The magnetic blast wave from the lower dantian’s star-fire spark had hit the heart heat flow system like a lightning strike on a telephone pole.
The sinoatrial node—the living pacemaker nestled in the wall of the right atrium—didn’t simply stall. It was flooded with high-hum magnetic noise.
Instead of a crisp, rhythmic sixty beats per minute, the muscle fibers of the ventricles began to shudder in chaotic, desynchronized spasms.
Fatal heart flutter.
No blood was leaving the heart. The heart-artery valve remained shut. Blood pressure, already crippled by the magnetic pull of the Dai Mai solenoid, collapsed to total zero.
Lin Ke’s head slumped backward against the stone wall.
