The fire didn’t come from outside. It ignited in the marrow of his thigh bone.
Lin Ke felt his core heat spike from near-freezing to four hundred degrees in the time it took a neuron to fire. The copper needle driven into his solar nerve web began to smoke, the surrounding skin curling back like burnt parchment to expose yellow fat under the skin that sizzled and dripped down his ribs.
In his mental workspace, the command had already carried out:
The diff was monstrous.
Every single living cell, every connective tissue strand, every calcium crystal in his bones, and every glassy glass spirit vein running through his twelve main pathways had to be physically deconstructed and recompiled into an iron-hard metal-stone-glass waveguide matrix.
The mental sandbox had proven the math was sound.
Zero syntax errors. Zero load-bearing regressions.
But mathematics didn’t lift a single ounce of mass or swing a single hammer. The physical meat of Colin Shaw’s mortal vessel had to do the brutal, heat-powered work of living restructuring.
