The heat bore down like a falling ceiling of molten brass.
Lin Ke looked up, his broken ribs screaming with every ragged gasp. The underside of the dropping planet was so vast that it had no curve. It was simply a flat, textured roof of bubbling dark rock, sulfur geysers, and blazing bright magma plates dropping toward their skulls at faster-than-sound speed.
The air pressure between the falling world and the bus floor spiked wildly, popping the ears of dozens of students in the rear ranks.
“Shields up!” a vanguard elder screamed, raising a bronze warding mirror that was already glowing red from blasting heat. “Hold the sky!”
“Put that mirror down, you idiot!” Lin Ke snarled, his voice drowned out by the roar of the dropping air. “You can’t catch a mountain on a saucer! If that rock touches the floor, we aren’t crushed—we’re overwritten!”
This wasn’t a meteor strike.
It was an unbounded raw memory write. The Sovereign of Genesis wasn’t throwing a projectile. It was allocating five hundred billion cubic miles of solid rock directly into the map point registers currently occupied by eighty thousand living men and women.
If the write committed, their physical matter wouldn’t be crushed into blood. Their core structures would simply be replaced by granite.
