The heat coming off the dark rock floor was hot enough to soften the soles of Lin Ke’s boots.
The air smelled like copper melted rock waste dropped into cooling oil. High above the stronghold, the glowing crimson void throbbed like an infected tooth, each heartbeat streaming a wave of dry, choking infrared heat wave that dried Lin Ke’s cracked lips until they split and bled.
In the center of the chamber, an ancient countdown timer had burned its way through the ceiling tiles.
It wasn’t written in human numbers, but in glowing hex-code glyphs that even a mortal laborer could interpret: twelve hours leftover.
Twelve hours before the core hardware reached critical melting point and the Ancient BIOS carried out a self-running, non-recoverable format_reality().
Resetting every star, every planet, and every mortal soul across three thousand planes back to zero-state unformatted memory.
“We have to break the lock,” Lin Ke said, his voice a dry croak.
He didn’t bother using a fresh spot on his thumb. He wedged his notched iron metal pen into the existing, bloody puncture wound on his left thumb pad. He pushed until the metal touched the outer bone of the fingertip bone.
