The Enter key clicked down with the weight of an iron anchor dropped into deep water.
In the first heartbeat, nothing moved.
Then, every star in the Three Thousand Worlds blinked.
It wasn’t a sudden darkness, but a terrifying spirit doubling.
For one breathless instant, two trillion living souls—from barefoot peasants wading in muddy rice paddies on Canglan to ancient recluses meditating in underground frost-caves—gasped all at once.
Every mind split in two.
They felt their physical flesh standing on the cracked, dry soil of the old world, while at the same time feeling their souls mirrored in a vast, clean, silent expanse of newly unformatted void.
The fork had instantiated.
