The light didn’t blind the eyes. It cooked the eye nerve from the inside out.
Two junior scribes from the Heavenly Records Pavilion looked directly at the shaking black glass slip for less than a breath. Both men shrieked all at once. They clawed at their faces as thin trickles of clear cerebrospinal fluid leaked from their tear ducts.
Their eyes were unfocused, the pupils dilated into ugly six-sided fractals that twitched in sync with the repeating chime.
“Cover the altar!” Shen Yue cried, throwing a heavy wolf-pelt over the black glass tablet. “Don’t look at the script! It’s burning through divine sense like boiling lye!”
Lin Ke dragged himself to the table, leaning heavily on the rough timber edge.
His ribs burned from the violent coughing fit. His right shoulder throbbed with a dull, heavy ache where the bone had been rammed back into the socket. His linen-wrapped palms left sticky rust-brown smudges on the wolf-fur.
“It’s not an attack,” Lin Ke rasped, his breath catching in his throat. “It’s an unformatted test dump. A broadcast intended for root hardware, not human eyes.”
He pulled his notched iron metal pen from his sash.
