The air in Sub-Vault Four was twenty degrees colder than ice. But smelled like an electric arc fire.
Lin Ke sat perfectly still on the black glass anvil slab. His bare chest rose and fell in slow, rhythmic cycles of six breaths per minute, the skin taut over ribs that had survived three years of relentless living optimization.
Beneath his navel, the Nine-Turn Rebased Golden Core was spinning at ninety thousand turns a minute.
It was no longer golden. It had tightly packed into a blazing bright, violet-white sphere the size of a pigeon’s egg, streaming thirty thousand kilopascals of internal deep water pressure. The extreme thickness exerted a gravity pull so intense that tiny flakes of slate dust lifted off the floor, orbiting his waist in faint, swirling ellipses.
The three-hour countdown was down to twenty-eight minutes.
Outside, the mountain shuddered under the distant, rhythmic pounding of Grand Ancestor Kuang’s personal air fleet. But inside the deep vault, there was only the steady hum of the cooling channels, the bitter smell of boiled snake-gall liniment, and the rhythmic, iron breathing of Meng Shan.
Lin Ke closed his eyes and brought up the final deployment checklist.
Checklist checked: 1. Ring buffer /dev/ren_du initialized. 2. Raft consensus daemon resident in kernel memory. 3. Copy-on-Write spirit paging active. 4. External mesh repeaters paired. 5. Grounding pylon anchored in bedrock.
