The smell of crushed dark rock was choking. That dry powder coated Lin Ke’s tongue with the taste of sulfur and old tombs.
At the center of Floor Five, the tower’s load-bearing keel rose into the murky crimson ceiling like an unhewn mountain root. It was thirty feet thick, a massive stone metal tube of pitch-black fiery rock carved with thousands of ancient, glowing blue formation runes that hummed with enough moving potential to level a city.
Perched on an iron work-scaffold bolted to the pillar’s flank was Daoist Black-Ink.
The merchant trade ring’s chief array artisan was a starved, hunchbacked fighter with fingers stained permanently violet from spirit-ink. He was wearing an expensive jade-mesh vest that stopped twenty-five times normal weight around his torso. That let him wield an iron-hard metal engraving chisel with rapid, wild strokes.
He was carving directly into the live channels of the keel.
Every time his chisel bit into the stone, a spray of azure sparks erupted, with a nauseating wave of gravity distortion that rippled across the floor.
Black-Ink was deliberately etching corrupted bypass glyphs across the main rule-book channels, shunting the excess gravity flux from the upper tiers directly into the climbing stairwell archway.
He was creating a nearby fifty-fold squeezing bottleneck. Anyone attempting to climb to Floor Six would be flattened into a tiny wafer of meat the moment they crossed the landing.
“Stop him,” Meng Shan rumbled, his knuckles white around his war hammer. “If he finishes that circuit, the stairwell becomes an iron press.”
Lin Ke raised his hand, halting the squad thirty paces from the scaffold.
The red haze of the hall froze into motionless amber. The sparks spraying from Black-Ink’s chisel hung stationary in mid-air.
In the mental sandbox, Lin Ke ran the assault.
Run 01: Lin Ke and Meng Shan charge the scaffold. At twenty paces, Black-Ink notices their advance and slams an emergency override token into the pillar’s control altar. The central keel unleashes a total forty-fold defensive blast wave. The moving pulse hits Lin Ke’s chest like a battering ram made of solid lead, flinging his squad seventy feet backward into the outer dark rock outer edge wall. Skeletons crushed against the stone. Instant death from chest total wipeout.
Lin Ke returned to meatspace, his chest burning with the phantom agony of shattered ribs.
He reached into his sleeve, found the iron metal pen. Then he drove the needle point deep into his left thumb pad until blood welled over the cold iron.
“Branch checked,” he whispered into the heavy air. “Main.”
Don’t attack the worker, Lin Ke realized coldly. Audit the codebase.
He stood thirty paces back, planted his boots firmly on the flat stone slabs. Then he focused his spiritual intent through his six dantian vortexes directly onto the runic surface of the central keel.
The glowing blue runes dissolved into a layered, historical audit trail in his vision.
Lines of ancient intent unspooled before him like commit logs on an ancient server storehouse.
Commit 01: Four hundred years ago. Inscribed by Master Chen of the Precursor Era. The foundational runes were clean, even, and perfectly balanced. Every gravity intake loop had a corresponding dampening shunt and a clockwork fail-safe valve. The system was designed for graceful degradation under load.
Then came the modern edits.
Commit 02: Sixty years ago. Azure Cloud Sect Elders’ Upkeep Synod.
Lin Ke’s eyes narrowed as he traced the clumsy, heavy-handed chisel work of the second commit.
The sect elders had bypassed three major rule-book nodes—Nodes 82, 83, and 84—cutting out the expensive tertiary dampening coils to save two hundred high-grade spirit stones in annual upkeep costs.
To hide the modification, they had crudely routed the excess heat exhaust into an unmonitored grounding channel, papering over the vulnerability with a cheap spiritual buffer glyph.
An unbounded buffer overflow.
The system was running on an unpatched legacy vulnerability.
The elders had removed the dampening coils. Because of that, Node 84 was running at ninety-eight percent heat saturation. It had zero capacity to absorb high-hum Yang energy.
Any unexpected spike in heat load at that specific junction would trigger an energetic cascade that the corrupted buffer glyph couldn’t handle.
Lin Ke looked at the scaffold where Daoist Black-Ink was chipping away, fully clueless to the historical flaw sitting four feet beneath his chisel.
Lin Ke’s lips thinned into an exhausted, icy smirk.
“They bypassed the load governor to save spirit stones,” Lin Ke whispered to the empty air. His fingers closed around his iron metal pen. “The entire south-facing circuit is running on an unvented surge.”