The empty pocket inside his lower belly was pulling his ribs inward with the force of a collapsing boiler.
Lin Ke knelt on the blood-soaked floor of the granite basin, his fingers digging into his knees. Layer Eight had just finished compiling. The autonomous hepatic buffer engine was locked into place. His glassy glass spirit veins hummed with clean, flawless sight clarity.
Every trace of historical melted rock waste was gone. The old turning to stone had been vomited onto the flat stone slabs. The heat scars had been flayed and restructured. The royal tracking listeners had been stripped to the root.
His foundation was spotless.
And fully, terrifyingly empty.
Without refined Qi to balance the external sky weight, the physics of meatspace were asserting themselves with brutal violence.
The air pressure of the room was pressing against his chest wall. His chest bone was bending inward by three tiny fractions of an inch. Blood was beginning to seep from his tear ducts as his brain pressure fought to equalize the empty pocket.
If he didn’t initiate core water drops in sixty seconds, his chest would cave in like an empty tin can under the sea.
