The green balefire needle was speeding up toward the quartz clock crystal at eight hundred feet per second.
Inside Lin Ke’s skull, the internal tracking data monitors were flashing like the control board of a burning power yard:
Fourteen point eight seconds.
His four ephemeral worker threads were approaching their hard-coded Time-To-Live.
The faceless sharp-angled spheres inside his Niwan Palace were beginning to fray at the edges, their exact care degrading as the allocated spiritual mist prepared to return to neutral breakdown. Within fifteen seconds, the four threads would cleanly deallocate. That left his root mind fully serial and defenseless against Gu’s end-post dive.
An traditional fighter would have panicked.
An traditional master would have wildly pumped fresh spiritual energy into the child souls, desperately trying to extend their lifespan to buy another minute of combat capability.
Lin Ke didn’t even consider it.
