The draft smelled of stale empty pocket and cold zinc.
Lin Ke stood in the center of the dark rock chamber. He felt the air currents tug at his torn tunic. Even with the Arch-Titan shattered into gravel, the fabric of the Causal Horizon was leaking like a rotted sieve.
Across the outer edge, dozens of hairline fractures in the void were oozing pale white foam.
Each leak was small—no larger than an arm span—but whenever an errant draft touched a supply wagon or a trench post, the wood winked out of reality. That left empty circular holes that whistled with unnatural silence.
If one of those void leaks drifted into the Two-Phase Locking array. Meanwhile, the arbitration was executing, a single null dereference would poison the entire state machine.
“We have leaks along the northern and eastern quadrants!” Shen Yue called out, her voice strained as she sprinted between comms tables. “The magic charms are crumbling! The void is eroding our defensive outer edge faster than we can ink fresh paper!”
Lin Ke reached into his sash.
His right thumb pad was still marked with a dozen tiny puncture wounds. But the skin was already tightening under the sped up healing of his Golden Immortal biology. He pressed the sharp iron metal pen into the flesh, drawing a neat bead of crimson.
