The sky between universes turned black with teeth.
Down the narrow slipstream separating origin/main from upstream/open-universe-v2.0, a living storm of one million Null-Pointer Horrors was dropping like a plague of locusts.
They took the shape of jagged, multi-jointed hounds, razor-winged vultures, and waving serpents forged from pale grey static. Every maw gaped wide, flickering with corrupted memory pointers hungry to dereference active matter.
Below them, stretched across the bottomless void, was Shen Yue’s energetic mid-air bridge.
Across that thin golden thread of timed together magic charms, the data payloads of forty mortal worlds—billions of sleeping human souls, ancient mountain ranges, and rivers of clear water—were streaming toward the new universe.
If the swarm touched that bridge, the corruption would be total.
Dangling references would latch onto migrating souls in transit, overwriting their identity blocks with null pointers. Billions of living people would arrive on the new world as drooling, vegetative husks with their Sea of Mind erased to blank memory.
“The defensive batteries are dry!” Zhao Wuji screamed, his voice raw as he scrambled across the debris. “We don’t have enough spirit stones to charge a single spark! Lin Ke, what do we shoot them with?!”
