The shaking came through the granite ceiling as a thin, high-pitched whine that set Lin Ke’s teeth on edge.
In the underground darkness of Sub-Vault Zero, the air had grown cold and thin. Ten thousand iterations of mental test model had burned up four hundred units of Lin Ke’s gas reserve. That created a nearby spiritual low-pressure zone that was quietly pulling surrounding Qi down through the mountain’s cracks like water draining from a tub.
On the surface, three hundred feet above their heads, the Imperial Ministry of Punishments was taking notice.
Lin Ke stood beneath the central air-flow chimney, his palm pressed against the cold stone. Through his glassy spirit veins, he tuned his internal sensors to the bedrock’s sound heat flow.
They noticed the pressure drop, Lin Ke thought.
Whenever a high-performance system begins heavy background compute, the surrounding power grid sags. To an ordinary outer student, the Seventh Ward simply felt a little draftier and colder today.
To a Royal Judge sweeping the sector with specialized fortune-telling mirrors, that sudden drop in surrounding energy was a flashing red light on an empty dashboard.
“They’re scanning the smelting sheds,” Shen Yue whispered. She was kneeling on the floor. She held an unrolled sheet of yellow mulberry paper, her dark eyes darting between her twin brushes. “I can feel the deep ring mirrors pinging the stone. It feels like someone tapping an iron finger against the back of my neck.”
