The nausea hit like an iron rod shoved down his throat-pipe.
Lin Ke leaned forward over his knees, his forehead slick with icy, greasy sweat that dripped onto the stone floor between his boots. Every muscle along his spine was locked in rigid, reflex tremor, trembling so hard his teeth clicked against each other in the gloom.
In his mind, he had just died.
Again.
Trial fifty-six had been a timed together lightning strike intersecting with a spatial snare. His simulated head had been cleanly boiled from the inside out, the cerebrospinal fluid vaporizing through his sinus passages in a split-second flash of white heat. The nerve recoil of Phantom Death Syndrome hammered his real physical lower brain with sickening force.
He didn’t wait for the phantom nausea to pass.
With shaking fingers, he drew the iron metal pen from his sash and plunged the point into the torn meat of his left thumb.
Pain—sharp, bright, and undeniable—shot up his median nerve.
