The air inside Lin Ke’s thirty-yard domain was as quiet as an empty pocket chamber.
Outside the sphere, the cave was a world-ending fire. The reversed flow-charge of the nine distributor nodes had turned the Grand Siphon into a raging, backward-surging vortex that shook the earth-shaking mantle eighteen miles below the earth.
Suspended three feet above Lin Ke, Envoy Chu Rong’s golden eye-prisms burned with the wild, end-post madness of a trapped beast.
“A mortal... An uncatalogued mortal node... Achieved an autonomous law engine?!” Chu Rong shrieked, his voice distorted into a clockwork banshee wail. “This violates every protocol of the Ministry! I’ll purge you with my core!”
[EMERGENCY OVERRIDE: Judge CHU RONG] [LIFE-FORCE CALCINATION PROTOCOL: ACTIVE] [OUTPUT: 300% OVERDRIVE / CORE VENTING]
Chu Rong’s wired spine ignited.
The starmetal cables along his spine bones flared with blinding white incandescence, consuming the leftovers of his living flesh to fuel his sky generator.
His right prosthetic arm detached from its wrist joint, reforming into a six-foot broadsword of white-hot solar star-fire—the Nine Heavens Annihilation Slash.
