The cold in Lin Ke’s mind was worse than the ice of the cooling trenches.
It was the cold of a server room at four in the morning, buzzing white lights flickering overhead, staring at an empty inbox while three production databases corrupted themselves into digital melted rock waste.
The psychic wave from the Bit-Rot Sovereign slammed directly into Lin Ke’s divine sea.
In an instant, twenty years of piled up tiredness, terror, and despair collided with thirty-eight years of Earth on-call burnout.
He saw himself at age thirty-five, sleeping on a threadbare cot in the Dublin data center, shaking with cheap caffeine and panic while executives demanded impossible deadlines.
He felt the cold, greasy dark rock floor of the Seventh Smelting Ward, the sting of Overseer Fang’s copper whip peeling the skin off his back, the dry, hacking cough of fire slaves dying in their bunks from iron-lung rot.
“It never ends, does it?” the amalgam monster whispered, its foul sludge pressing against the mental boundary. “No matter how many patches you write, someone always breaks the system. No matter how many hours you bleed, the managers take the bonus, the patriarchs take the pills. You end up dying alone in the dark.”
