The shaking in his lower belly didn’t feel like power. It felt like an unbolted high-pressure pump thrashing itself to pieces against a concrete footing.
Lin Ke knelt on the dark rock floor of Sub-Vault Zero. His jaw clamped so was tight that his back teeth groaned. Twelve thousand pounds of pressure of tightly packed spiritual fluid was hammering against the inside curve of his lower dantian, hunting for an exhaust port that didn’t exist.
His congenital glass spirit veins hummed with a thin, reedy squeal. Under the skin of his forearms, beneath the pale grease of old smelting burns, hair-thin lines of chalky white flashed and faded—micro-fissures spreading through the rigid, non-elastic waveguides.
If the vessel wall yields by two hair-fractions, he thought, breathing through flared nostrils, the whole pipe hub disintegrates.
He didn’t pray. He didn’t recite old family mantras about merging the dragon and tiger.
Instead, he closed his eyes and forced his mind into the dark partition behind his forehead.
Branch, his mind commanded with the cold reflex of an engineer killing a runaway production thread. Fork baseline state.
The cave fell silent in his mind. The red steam hanging above the dark rock flags froze into crystal-clear needles.
