In the mental sandbox, Lin Ke smelled his own ribs turning to vapor.
The fire wasn’t an ordinary flame. It was the high-hum Yang burning of the Azure Cloud Sect’s Nine-Fold Crimson Palm. A training manual originally designed for students with thick, fleshy spirit veins who could bleed heat into surrounding fat tissue like a water-cooled engine block.
In the original timeline, Colin Shaw had survived the breakthrough by routing the fire exhaust directly into the hardened iron melted rock waste in his bones. The heavy minerals had functioned as an accidental heat sink, soaking up the thousand-degree heat pulse and baking into an even harder, brittle crust.
Now, having stripped that toxic melted rock waste in Commit 002, the heat had nowhere to go.
In the test model, the crimson fire ripped out of the boy’s lower dantian at three hundred miles per hour. It hit the un-hardened honeycomb bone lattice and flash-boiled the organic marrow into white-hot gas in forty split seconds.
The ribs exploded outward like an overcharged pressure cooker.
Lin Ke reset the cursor.
Don’t panic, his mind hummed with the cold and exact detach of an on-call engineer watching a public works outage at four in the morning. A heat sink is a crutch. What I need is a cooling loop.
