The heat streaming from Lin Ke’s skull was hot enough to curl the edges of the dry parchment resting on his knees.
His forehead burned at one hundred and four degrees. Sweat ran down his collarbones in boiling rivulets. It soaked through three layers of linen before evaporating in the dry, feverish air of the sealed pavilion. Every tendon in his neck stood rigid as cured gut-string, twitching with reflex, spastic tremors that made his chin jerk rhythmically toward his left collarbone with every passing breath.
Inside his skull, he had just been murdered for the one hundred and fortieth time.
It wasn’t a metaphor.
A mental test model collapsed under a hostile thread takeover. Then, the psychological recoil was impossible to tell apart from physical reality. The brain didn’t possess a backup sense register marked ‘virtual.’ The simulated eye nerve registered teeth tearing through the back-skull lobe. Then, the living motor cortex responded by firing emergency distress signals across every motor unit in the flesh.
One hundred and forty times, Lin Ke had felt his simulated Sea of Mind torn open from the inside out.
One hundred and forty times, he had felt teeth woven of his own stolen childhood memories rip through his core ego, severing his language centers, devouring his sense of exact logic, and leaving him choking in a deep pit of screaming static.
