The sound in Lin Ke’s skull was not a voice. It was a carrier wave.
A high-pitched, metal drone—like a rusted iron drill biting into a tooth—buzzed behind his forehead with rhythmic, sickening regularity. Every ninety seconds, the carrier wave peaked in a sharp, pulsing burst of sky bytecode:
[POLL: QUERY_ENTITY_REGISTRY_STATUS] [RESPONSE_REQUIRED: T-MINUS 238:14:02] [FAILURE_ACTION: UNCONDITIONAL_CORE_PURGE]
Across Iron Sword Province, three hundred reclusive fighters were currently crawling on their chamber floors. It screamed into their carpets. The broadcast pulse tightened like a tightening band of hot brass around their temples.
It was a self-running rule-following sweep.
Chu Rong hadn’t even bothered to stay awake. The judge had simply activated the Golden Scroll’s wide-area polling daemon. He set a ten-day timeout counter, and gone to sleep in his silk-draped pavilion. When the counter reached zero, any Soul Formation entity that had failed to return a cryptographically signed blood-token would have their dantian clamped by the regional drain tube network.
Lin Ke sat cross-legged on a stone slab inside Sub-Vault Zero. He was surrounded by three layers of lead-shielded walls.
Spread out before him on an iron crate was a blackened, brittle bamboo scroll recovered from the deep archives: The Nine-Turn Ashen Soul Splice.
