The clockwork roar of Chu Rong’s dive was three-tenths of a second from cutting Lin Ke’s spine in half.
Above the narrow high walkway, the diamond claws of the sky judge burned with violet star-fire. He dropped through the roaring cave with forty tons of moving gaining speed.
Below the narrow high walkway, the central inversion switch—a massive copper grounding pylon three feet in width—hummed with the raw, raw throughput of nine land-wide ley lines.
To lock the inversion in place, someone had to hold the physical manual override lever down for six seconds.
Six seconds of conducting seventy million units of reversed world-size voltage through living meat.
Lin Ke’s Early Soul Formation foundation was a stone-built bottleneck. His glassy glass spirit veins, brilliant as they were at low latency, had a throughput ceiling.
If he grabbed that copper lever right now, his waveguides would disintegrate into tiny powdered quartz within three seconds.
There was only one way to survive.
