The crack of breaking stone echoed across Floor Five like a gunshot.
Daoist Black-Ink had stopped carving. His hunchbacked frame whipped around on the iron scaffold, his ink-stained fingers freezing as his bloodshot eyes locked onto Lin Ke standing thirty paces away.
“You!” Black-Ink shrieked, his voice cracking with hysteria. “How are you standing on Floor Five?! You should be red grease on the third tier!”
He didn’t wait for an answer. With a manic snarl, Black-Ink slammed his chisel handle against the activation rune on his array desk.
“Die in the press, vermin!”
A bone-shaking, low-hum blew up from the ceiling.
The air above Lin Ke’s head distorted. It warped into a dark, shimmering lens of warped gravity pull.
Forty-five times static gravity.
The downward force slammed into Lin Ke’s shoulders like a falling mountain. His knees buckled by two inches, his Ashen Iron Lattice groaning with terrifying, metal deep ring as five thousand pounds of nearby pressure tried to drive his boots through the dark rock floor.
The flat stone slabs cracked beneath his soles, fine white stone dust erupting from the fractures.
Lin Ke’s breath was driven clean out of his chest, his lungs flattening against his spine.
The nearby gravity lens froze in mid-squeezing. The cracks spreading through the stone beneath his boots halted.
In the mental sandbox, Lin Ke analyzed Node 84 on the central pillar.
The node was a junction box carved from dark rock, barely four inches across. It glowed with a bloated, sickly blue soft glow. Sixty years ago, the sect elders had stripped its heat dampeners. It replaced them with a static grounding glyph that could handle moving load. But had zero limit for heat variance.
Run 01: Fire a standard Crimson Yang blast at Black-Ink. Result: The forty-five-fold gravity field bends the flight path downward into the floor. Attack fails. Lin Ke’s spine fractures under sustained load within three seconds.
Run 02: Throw the iron metal pen charged with a packed micro-packet of Crimson Yang fire directly into Node 84’s unpatched intake fissure.
Test: The high-hum Yang heat energy strikes the soaked junction. Node 84 can’t vent the heat. The heat swelling instantly fractures the crude spirit-lead solder sealing the seam.
The logic gate trips. With its rule-book circuit cut, the nearby forty-five-fold field loses its target map points and reflects along the path of least pushback—straight back up the current-carrying copper lines leading to Black-Ink’s control altar.
Lin Ke returned to meatspace, his ribs screaming under forty-five times normal weight of real, crushing pressure.
His vision was darkening at the edges, tiny blood vessels bursting in his white of the eye.
He reached down, his trembling fingers closing around the iron metal pen.
With his thumbnail, he dragged the needle point across his left thumb pad. That let the searing pain ignite his focus.
“Branch checked,” he whispered through bloody lips. “Main.”
He didn’t try to stand. He stayed locked in his low, incompressible arch, channeling every drop of Crimson Yang fire from his six dantian vortexes into his right hand.
The four-inch iron metal pen began to glow.
Not blue. Not yellow.
A searing, blinding cherry-red that made the air around his fingers shimmer with heat haze.
“Overload the junction,” Lin Ke rasped.
With a sharp, whip-like flick of his wrist, Lin Ke hurled the iron metal pen.
Under forty-five times normal weight, throwing an object was nearly impossible. The downward pull curved any flight path into the dirt within five paces.
But Lin Ke didn’t throw it in an arc.
He skimmed it along the floor. He used the flat dark rock flat stone slabs as a guide rail, the white-hot iron needle hissing across the stone at faster-than-sound speed like an iron snake.
Tink.
The needle struck the central pillar dead-center on Node 84.
The hardened point punched half an inch into the brittle spirit-lead solder that sealed the sixty-year-old patch.
For a split second, nothing happened.
Then, the Crimson Yang heat packet blew up inside the stone.
Eight hundred degrees of focused fire heat flashed into the uncooled dark rock channel. The rock didn’t melt. It suffered violent, total heat shock. The stone lattice fractured, the crude bypass glyph tore apart. The massive gravity flux rushing through the node had nowhere to go.
The buffer overflowed.
An ear-splitting, metal screech echoed from the core of the pillar, like a thousand iron saws tearing through plate steel.
The shimmering forty-five-fold gravity lens above Lin Ke’s head collapsed into nothingness.
The redirected striking force didn’t fade.
It surged backward along the heavy copper wires running up the scaffold. That turned the channels blinding white, rushing straight into the control altar where Daoist Black-Ink was wildly clawing at his runes.
“What did you do?!” Black-Ink shrieked, his eyes bulging as the altar beneath his hands began to hum with violet lightning. “The circuit... It’s reversing—”
KABOOM.
The array desk exploded.
A bone-shaking blast wave of blue lightning and crushed dark rock shrapnel blew the iron scaffold to pieces.
Black-Ink was hurled thirty feet through the air like a rag doll. It screamed as the bone-shaking blast shattered both of his forearms into jagged splinters of bone.
He slammed into the far outer edge wall with a sickening wet crunch, collapsing into the darkness, unconscious and broken among the smoking rubble.
Lin Ke slowly pushed himself upright on the cracked flat stone slabs.
His bandaged shins held. His Ashen Iron Lattice was intact.
He walked over to the base of the pillar, reached down into the smoking crater of Node 84. Then he pulled his blackened iron metal pen from the fractured rock.
The needle was scorched, but whole.
“A simple pool over-pressure,” Lin Ke murmured, wiping the hot dust on his sleeve. “Unpatched for sixty years. You should have read your changelogs.”