The brass drain tube didn’t draw golden power.
It sucked up pure, black sludge that whistled through the copper pipe like boiling pitch through an ungreased cannon. Within three seconds of penetration, the raw copper alloy turned dull violet, then frostbitten white. Then he finally shattered into hundreds of razor-sharp, frozen shrapnel fragments that tore across Zhao Wuji’s silk robes and gouged the flesh of his chest.
Zhao Wuji shrieked, clutching his right hand against his ribs.
His fingers were blackened to the second knuckle, the skin frostbitten by a total zero chill that froze the blood inside his tiny blood vessels before it could spill onto the stone. The three-foot drain tube collapsed into grey, rotting dust, leaving a gaping, jagged hole directly in the center of Node 07’s main data bus.
From the puncture wound in the end-post, the foul fog poured.
It didn’t billow like campfire smoke. It oozed upward like heavy, high-pressure liquid silver, jet-black and bubbling with millions of writhing, tiny silver characters that looked like maggots swimming in spoiled ink.
The substance touched the sterilized air of the machine room. Then, the surrounding heat plummeted thirty degrees. Moisture in the air instantly froze, coating the crystal-clear racks in a thick layer of oily, black rime frost that crackled with violent, rotting static discharge. The thirty-foot crystal racks began to groan under the sudden heat contraction, tiny stress fractures chiming in the gloom like cracked flutes.
