The cold was worse than the fire.
It hit the moment Node 1 sent its first exact timing packet down the Ren-Du tracking data bus. It wasn’t the cold of winter mountain air or deep river ice. It was total heat zero—the psychic empty pocket of the astral void slamming into mortal mammalian flesh.
Lin Ke’s core living body heat plunged from ninety-nine degrees to eighty-eight degrees Fahrenheit in four seconds.
At the exact same time, the leftover half of his Golden Core inside his dantian flared to two hundred degrees, boiling his interstitial fluids. Meanwhile, his limbs turned to blue, frozen animal fat.
The Soul-Shiver.
Every historical scroll on unorthodox soul-severing warned of this exact threshold. The detached soul re-established energetic contact with the living vessel. Then, the flow pushback mismatch between sky intent and mortal tissue generated total ringing back-and-forth swing across the automatic nervous system.
Lin Ke’s physical frame seized into violent, ear-splitting convulsions.
His heels hammered an uneven, ninety-cycle tattoo against the stone floor. His elbows flared outward, his forearms shaking with such wild speed that the air around his wrists whistled.
