The silence that fell over reality didn’t feel like the absence of sound. It felt like the sudden, total cessation of physics.
Lin Ke tapped the dark rock end-post key, entering the fateful command:
Across the three thousand mortal realms, the clock of the universe stopped dead.
Water surging over a four-hundred-foot waterfall froze in mid-air, suspended as a huge wall of motionless glass.
A dry maple leaf falling toward a mountain brook locked into the empty air, motionless between branches.
In the mortal cities, bread falling from a baker’s hand remained hovering three inches above the dirt.
The entire cosmos had entered Single-User Maintenance Mode.
“The river... The river has stopped roaring,” Meng Shan whispered, leaning over the narrow high walkway to look into the deep-sea trenches. “Even the shakes in the rock have died. It feels like standing inside a block of solid ice.”
