The smell of boiling coolant and bitter copper filled the grand round hall.
Five hundred meters of corrupted, dangling array indices slithered across the black glass floor with the ear-splitting shriek of rusted saws grinding against iron.
The Void Centipede’s jagged legs—each one an unindexed pointer flickering with virulent violet static—gouged four-foot trenches into the stone as it charged directly toward the main ice-cold coolant lines.
Behind the giant beast, thousands of smaller null-beasts poured through the blasted inner wall, scuttling like hairless, semi-clear spiders hungry for raw memory registers.
If the coolant trunk was cut, the heat of the Epoch Zero processor would spike to three million degrees in twelve seconds, melting the Root End-post through the crust of the work-yard.
And Lin Ke couldn’t move.
He lay pinned inside the white jade star-fire cradle, forty dragon-bone needles driven along his spine, his living phase shift suspended at eighty percent completion.
A single twitch of his muscles would disrupt the delicate recrystallization of his Optical Dao-Fibers, causing his newly formed channels to shear apart like brittle spun glass.
