The sound was not an explosion. It was the roar of reality recompiling its source code from bare metal.
From the central end-post stone stand, a physical blast wave of raw, unformatted compilation energy swelled outward in a blinding ring of white-hot star-fire.
The air within three hundred miles of Epoch Zero turned into a screaming vortex of tightly packed air pressure.
“The vault can’t contain this!” Shen Yue shouted, her robes whipping wildly as she braced herself behind Meng Shan’s broad shoulders. “The compile heat alone will turn the bedrock into liquid magma!”
“The rock is already softening,” Meng Shan grunted, his boots sinking two inches into the molten melted rock waste of the black glass flat stone slabs. “My channels are shaking so hard my teeth are loose, Lin Ke! If we don’t dump this load, the entire mountain range collapses into the mantle!”
Lin Ke stood at the console, his clothes scorched, his charred hands gripping the dark rock casing.
The stench of burning pyrite and scorched leather rose from his boots. Inside his forearms, his Vitreous Glass spirit veins hummed with a sharp, crystal-clear agony. Thousands of tiny stress fractures screaming under the back-EMF of an unbuffered cosmic current. There was no stretch in glass. Every micro-joule of surplus moving load threatened to shear his channels into powder.
