The gravity drop felt like stepping off an iron scaffold into an abandoned mine shaft.
Lin Ke’s stomach slammed against his ribs as the horizon tipped twelve degrees to the north. A grinding shriek—louder than a hundred iron gates dragging across rough granite—tore through the bedrock beneath the camp.
To the west, three entire mortal continents and four billion living souls were physically separating from the floor of heaven.
The spatial bridge connecting Shard 09 to the staging grounds snapped with a bone-shaking blast wave that blew the canvas roofs off fifty logistics tents. Where stone and mountain ranges had met a moment ago, there was now only a yawning, total void. A pure, pitch-black deep gap of unindexed, unaddressed reality.
The continent was drifting outward into the dark, pulled by the terrifying empty pocket of unallocated space.
“The bedrock is shearing!” Meng Shan bellowed, his heavy boots skidding across the fracturing lip of the deep gap. “Master Lin! If the shelf drops another fifty paces, the entire Western Ridge goes with it!”
Lin Ke reached for his belt.
His left collarbone burned with every jolt, the linen wrap tight and stiff against his bruised chest. He ignored the fire in his collar bone, pulled his iron metal pen from his sash. Then he drove the notched tip hard into his thumb pad.
