The crash didn’t wait for the sun to set.
Zhao Wuji’s forehead touched the mud and the fight-or-flight rush drained from Lin Ke’s bloodstream. Then, the living reality of what he had done slammed into his nervous system like a derailed freight train.
Lin Ke’s knees didn’t bend. They simply unlocked.
He fell straight forward into the rubble, his chest hitting the wet flat stone slabs with a dull, heavy slap.
His vision folded in on itself from the edges, the gray sky collapsing into a narrow, spinning tunnel of black static.
There was no magic rollback for living tissue.
The mental sandbox had tested the code, the solid-state core was a flawless building triumph. His glassy glass spirit veins were running at zero flow pushback.
But the meat—the thirty-eight-year-old soul inhabiting a starved, twenty-four-year-old human shell—had just unrolled seven years of cellular history, vomited forty pounds of heavy metal, endured a hundred-and-six-degree fever. Then he grounded a hundred thousand kilovolts of cosmic test current in thirty-six hours.
