The sensation was not falling. It was being fed feet-first into a thousand spinning threshing drums at once.
One moment Colin Shaw was Lin Ke, chained to a cold dark rock pillar in the Primordial Bus. The next, his singular mind was wildly split into one thousand independent, screaming execution threads.
In Thread 012, he was an ascetic meditating on a snowbound peak in the Kunlun range. He watched his glass spirit veins calcify into brittle frost before shattering under the pressure of sky thunder.
In Thread 088, he was a grand sect master sitting on a nine-tiered jade dais, his mortal memories eroding like sandstone under an ocean tide until his sense of self dissolved into blank, mindless Dao-catatonia.
In Thread 412, he was a fire slave in the Seventh Smelting Ward. His chest burned away as molten spiritual bronze poured down his throat.
The piled up psychological recoil—the Phantom Death Syndrome of nine hundred concurrent fatal terminations—hit the root observer like an avalanche of white-hot melted rock waste.
Hold the parent process, his core mind screamed through the static of a thousand dying minds. Don’t let the child threads overwrite the root stack!
Lin Ke looked across the screaming chaos of his fractured mind.
