The chamber didn’t grow darker. It filled with the blinding glare of eighty-four thousand burning red suns.
Each rune hung suspended in the void between the diamond sarcophagi. They weren’t static glyphs. They were radioactive ontological paradoxes. It burned with the heat of contradictory physical laws clashing against one another.
The air in the BIOS chamber buzzed with a sound like a million cicadas trapped inside an iron kettle.
Every breath tasted of raw copper and ozone.
The heat wave from eighty-four thousand floating conflicts stung Lin Ke’s eyes, raising tiny red welts across the exposed skin of his neck and cheeks.
“Twenty-four hours,” Lin Ke muttered, leaning his weight against the Root Stone base.
His braced left arm was throbbing with a dull, rhythmic ache that pulsed in sync with his heartbeat. Every breath in pulled sharply against the cracked ribs on his left side. But his right hand remained steady on his iron metal pen.
“Eighty-four thousand...” Elder Wu whispered, collapsing onto his haunches, his old family ledgers tumbling around him in the dust. “Each conflict is a supreme spirit riddle! In the ancient texts, Patriarch Taiyi spent four hundred years meditating under a pine tree just to resolve the balance between water-yin and fire-yang! To solve eighty-four thousand in one single day... It’s exactly impossible!”
