The deeper the trace went, the darker the blood looked.
Lin Ke remained crouched in the shadow of the huge jade spire. His back was pressed against the base of the stone stand. His nosebleed had slowed to a dark crust. But the high-hum ringing in his ears sounded like a damaged transformer hum.
He held a blank, thumb-sized jade slip between two charred fingers, using his iron metal pen to carve a magnetic-pull data drain tube directly into the stone’s crystal-clear surface.
“How much longer?” Wu DeZheng hissed, crouching behind the three-ton melted rock waste cart with his knees trembling so wildly the loose tools on the cart rattled against each other. “The patrol rotation changes at the fifth bell! If those brass giants swing around the northern arcade, we’re minced pork!”
“Two minutes,” Lin Ke whispered. “The commit history was just the entry point. There’s an active background process running right now.”
In his mental sandbox, Lin Ke tapped the kernel thread.
In standard Daoist cosmology, when an aspiring mortal fighter fails their Heavenly Sky-trial, their physical vessel is destroyed. Their gathered spiritual energy is meant to dissolve back into the world. It disperses into rainfall, seeps into mountain springs, and nourishes the underground spiritual veins of the mortal realm. A closed, sustainable ecological cycle.
