The heat coming from the continent-sized screen hummed against Lin Ke’s cheekbones like an open fire door.
He stood on the edge of the crystal-clear watching pier. He looked down into the vast, glowing expanse of the Epoch Zero console. The air in the chamber was thin and freezing. It carried the sharp, clean bite of boiled away freezing liquid and the faint, bitter aroma of the gentian root Apothecary He was grinding on an iron mortar behind him.
The cooling fluid below—a dark, thick, sticky ocean of zero-pushback liquid helium—rippled with gentle, eerie-glowing waves, each ripple carrying away trillions of BTUs of heat load generated by the cosmic processor.
And across the black crystal-clear display, the working state of the multiverse was laid bare.
It was a total horror show of piled up technical debt.
Ten thousand years of unhandled warnings.
Nine hundred thousand memory leaks where dead emperors had locked private spirit realms.
Millions of stale, abandoned branches where ancient sects had tried to rewrite local gravity laws. That left their dead code cluttering the cosmic heap.
