The pain was not a sharp sting. It was a cold, leaden weight expanding behind his navel like an iron cannonball greased with axle fat.
Lin Ke stumbled down the metal ramp leading away from the central dais. His boots skidded across the punched holes in grating. His left arm was twitching with spastic, rhythmic jerks, the fingers clawing at empty air as grey rotting discoloration spread from his shoulder muscle down to his knuckles.
His Void Buffer was at ninety-nine point eight percent volume holding.
The internal partition had failed fully. Inside the space-folding sub-pocket, the Stygian Soul-Severing Bile and the Nine-Tainted Corpse-Wine had hybridized into a bubbling, hyper-acidic rotting slurry with a measured pH of zero point six.
The space-folding walls were buckling.
Three minutes.
He couldn’t pop the stash internally. That was instant living dissolving.
Nor could he simply open his palm and vomit one hundred and thirty drops of boiling rotting acid onto the iron narrow high walkway.
