The silence in the great council hall was so total that the slow drip of melting candle wax sounded like falling stones.
Every sect master, clan patriarch, and sword saint sat frozen. He stared at Lin Ke as if he had just sprouted three heads forged of lightning and void-iron.
“A second house...?” Patriarch Song murmured, his mouth opening and closing like a stranded carp. “Senior Lin, you speak in riddles. Are you proposing we build a pocket dimension? Even the greatest mountain-sized grotto realm can barely sustain three hundred thousand souls before its spirit veins collapse!”
“Not a pocket dimension,” Lin Ke said, his voice flat, steady, and devoid of mysticism. “A parallel reality. A clean, independent working branch of the universe.”
*
Lin Ke tapped the table with the tip of his iron metal pen.
“We don’t patch a burning building while the roof is falling on our heads. We leave it behind. We travel to the Primordial Data Center of Epoch Zero at the cosmic event horizon, gain office access to the root origin array, and spin up a decoupled universal framework: upstream/open-universe-v2.0.”
He looked around the room, meeting their scared, blank gazes one by one.
