The smell of scorched marrow hit first.
It was a sharp, greasy reek, like pork fat dropped directly onto a red-hot iron plate. Heat radiated behind Lin Ke’s chest bone with the sickening pressure of a capped boiler groaning under forty sea-weights.
Beneath the parchment-thin skin of his forearms, his glassy glass spirit veins pulsed in blinding flashes of blazing bright violet. Non-elastic. Zero dilation. Sight-grade waveguides pushed past their heat tolerances.
Every breath tasted of spark-charged copper.
If the heat inside his dantian rose another three degrees, the crystal-clear casing of his Golden Core would undergo total heat shock. Crystal-clear fracturing at seventy thousand turns a minute was not an injury. It was an internal fragmentation grenade.
A dull ache pounded behind his eyes, rhythmic and heavy as a trip-hammer.
Vertical scaling is dead, Lin Ke thought. His jaw was clenched so hard his back teeth ground together like millstones. You can’t clock an un-finned silicon die to ten gigahertz just because you pray to the sky.
He closed his eyes.
