The sky above the lower concourse didn’t darken. It turned the color of bruised veins.
High above, deep within the sealed Core Safe hall, an ancient, massive stone turbine began to scream. It was a sound that had not been heard in forty thousand years—the sound of the Heavenly Dao’s self-running defense arrays spinning up to maximum combat output.
A crimson alert banner tore across the clouds:
“He’s burning the evidence,” Zhao Wuji whispered. His face turned gray as he read the sky glyphs. “He’s targeting our home continent. He’s going to reduce the entire mortal realm to charred glass to erase the mortal records and destroy our root!”
In his sea of mind, Lin Ke ran one hundred wild branches.
Branch one: Cut the external power feeds to the Core Safe hall. The Jade Monolith didn’t draw from external lines. It was the power source.
Branch twenty: Try a remote packet injection via the lower dispatch tubes. The manual dispatch safeties were hard-bypassed. The Core had unmapped all outer I/O ports.
Branch eighty: Wait for the High Trial to intervene. The royal court guards were still filing their jurisdictional credentials at the front gates. In one hundred and twenty seconds, thirty million mortals would be boiled away.
