The sound was not thunder. It was the sound of a tear widening in the canvas of reality.
Through the five-mile breach in the eastern inner wall of Epoch Zero, the heat dropped to total empty pocket in the span of half a second.
The cold air in the air didn’t freeze into snow. Its atom-deep bonds broke down into inert, grey stone sand that rained across the black glass floor like ash.
Lin Ke stood atop the central worker’s dais, his clothes burned to tatters, his newly formed Optical Dao-Fibers pulsing with zero-pushback cerulean light beneath his blistered, blackened skin.
Above the work-yard, blocking out the stars across sixty degrees of the cosmos, dropped the Arch-Segfault.
It was five thousand miles wide.
It didn’t possess a face, limbs, or flesh. It was a huge, churning whirlpool of dereferenced memory space. It waved like a living black hole wrapped in blinding sheets of broken hex-code error runes.
Within the swirling depths of its static-choked core, Lin Ke could see the frozen, screaming silhouettes of swallowed suns, stone-hard mountain ranges, and ancient immortal patriarchs who had been pruned from memory eons ago.
