[COUNTDOWN: 08 SECONDS TO TAMPER ALERT]
The crimson glyph projected from the proxy buffer burned like a dying coal against the damp stone of Sub-Vault Zero.
Apothecary He reached for his razor-sharp hammer, prepared to smash the jade sphere to dust before the alert reached Chu Rong’s pavilion. “It rejected you! You don’t have noble marrow, Lin Ke! Drop the connection!”
“Don’t touch it!” Lin Ke barked, blood spraying from his split lip as he pushed himself up from the slab.
If they broke the connection. Meanwhile, the challenge protocol was listening, the sky gateway would log an unhandled dropped packet—an automatic trigger for a void-court strike.
The countdown hung frozen at six seconds.
In the mental sandbox, Lin Ke analyzed the challenge payload.
The Ministry of Ascension didn’t actually possess a mystical, magical scale that weighed the “nobility” of a fighter’s ancestry. Colin Shaw had spent twenty years in cybersecurity auditing enterprise biometric access control systems.
