The pressure dropped so fast Lin Ke’s ears popped.
A high, thin whine cut through the morning mist over the Azure Cloud terrace, sharp as a wet wire dragged across lead. Then the air died.
Every bird in the pine ridges fell silent at once. The smell of crushed hemlock and wet slate vanished, replaced by an acrid, dry ozone reek that tasted like licking the terminals of an unshielded charge bank.
Lin Ke stood at the edge of the limestone low roof wall, his leather-wrapped fingers resting on the cold iron rail.
His glass spirit veins didn’t pulse. They hummed.
Deep within his chest cavity, the rigid crystal-clear waveguides—frost-clear, fully non-elastic, heavy with years of stone-hardened melted rock waste—registered a sudden drop in surrounding spiritual thickness. It wasn’t a gentle autumn scattering.
It was an abrupt, jagged dip. A fifteen percent drop in baseline sky Qi over four seconds.
A negative pressure slope, Colin Shaw noted behind his eyes. Someone just kicked on an unmetered intake pipe hub directly above our heads.
