The gaze of the Arch-Daemon felt like being placed beneath an electron microscope running at fifty thousand volts.
Every atom in Lin Ke’s body hummed under the scrutiny. The sheer calculating presence of the ten-league entity displaced the air pressure in the chamber. That turned the air so dry and thin that his split lips began to cry tiny beads of blood once more. Micro-crystal-clear stress fractures clicked faintly along the glassy glass spirit veins in his forearms, warning him of mounting magnetic-pull pushback.
Behind him, eighty thousand soldiers gripped their weapons, their knuckles white. Their breath was held in scared awe.
The Arch-Daemon didn’t reach for a sword.
It didn’t summon lightning.
It simply opened its massive, sharp-angled torso. It showed a swirling core of pure, uncompiled machine logic that cast long, green-shadowed lines across the crystal-clear watching pier. The heat dropped twenty degrees in a single second, frosting the hem of Lin Ke’s tunic with needle-sharp rime.
“Intruder,” the Arch-Daemon spoke, its voice rattling the dark rock foundations of reality like earth-shaking plates grinding in a crust-sink zone. “You have submitted breaking changes to the cosmic root. You have tried to delete the hereditary covenants of the First Maintainers and replace the sky scheduler with an unproven open-source branch.”
