The shear hit like a guillotine made of cold glass.
Lin Ke’s boots skidded across dressed dark rock, the shaking rattling up through his shins like a hammer striking an anvil. The air smelled of ozone, copper filings, and charred marrow—the distinct stink of reality being torn along its crystal-clear seams.
Ahead, the sky above the Outer Heavens didn’t curve into clouds or sky vaults. It had fractured into a jagged mosaic of polygonal tiles, each tessellation shimmering with a different hue of dead glowing.
A patrol of three True Immortals from the Vanguard Division took two hurried strides across a pale hairline fracture in the stone.
Before Lin Ke could shout, the lead scout’s beard turned white in the space of a heartbeat. His robes rotted into grey cobwebs. His skin puckered, shriveled, and stuck to his ribs like sun-dried mutton.
The man opened his jaws to scream.
No sound came out. The sound of his breath in hung frozen in the seam, advancing toward the camp at less than an inch per minute. At the same time, his physical body tumbled forward four hundred years older than his boots.
“Hold the line!” Lin Ke barked, his voice raw as gravel. “Nobody crosses the tile seams! Plant your heels into the dead stone!”
