The cold didn’t burn like frost. It erased like an eraser dragging across dry graphite.
The physical descent from the Epoch Zero sky console had snapped wildly through seven sky strata, their high-sky void skiff shedding glowing heat tiles as re-entry friction scorched the hull cherry-red. Plummeting past the invisible ozone canopy and the storm-wracked clouds of Canglan Continent, they had crash-landed directly onto the old family roots of the Azure Cloud Sect to arrest the spreading cascade failure at its physical origin. Now, as the skiff’s cooling vents hissed into the dust, Lin Ke stood at the cliff edge of Sub-Vault Zero, his cracked boots planted on the shuddering bedrock of the Azure Cloud Sect.
Behind them, three hundred miles of the Iron Sword Province were vanishing. The jagged granite peaks didn’t crumble or tumble down into rockslides. They simply dropped out of the rendering pipeline. The sky turned into a dead, blinding grid of chalk-white static, leaving empty box-shaped vacancies where matter had stood three breaths before.
A low, low, deep hum rattled the fillings in Lin Ke’s back teeth.
Every hair on his forearms stood straight up as the sky insulating broken down. It filled the air with the sharp, metal stink of ozone and dead empty pocket.
