The gravity drag on Floor Seven was so terrifying that Lin Ke’s eyelids felt like lead shutters dragged over dry eyeballs.
Forty times static gravity.
The surrounding pressure made the marrow inside his Ashen Iron Lattice hum at forty-two hertz. That bone-deep hum rattled his teeth in his jaw.
High above the vast circular arena of Floor Seven, perched on a cantilevered watching balcony of white jade, stood Zhao Wuji.
The merchant-heir was no longer smiling. His emerald silk robes fluttered gently inside an artificial zero-gravity ward projected by a golden bell dangling from his waist. But his face was twisted into a snarl of pure high-born fury.
Beside him stood four senior clan guards, their hands resting on heavy brass windlasses.
“Fire rat,” Zhao’s voice boomed down from the balcony, amplified by formation speakers into an ear-splitting roar. “You killed my hired blades. You ruined my array artisans. But you’ll not set foot on the eighth tier!”
Zhao raised his hand. “Drop the shroud!”
The four guards tripped the crank winch levers.
From the high rafters, a massive, fifty-foot circular web of woven black spirit-silk plunged downward like a falling thundercloud.
The Heavy-Earth Suppression Net.
A forbidden, black-market holding ancient object woven from deep-sea spider-silk and weighted at the outer edge with eight massive spheres of spirit-lead. The moment the silk touched an energetic field, its runes rang with surrounding gravity, multiplying the local field by two.
Under forty times normal weight, anyone caught beneath the net would experience eighty times static load.
At eighty times normal weight, human bones didn’t break. They melted.
Meng Shan snarled, raising his heavy tower shield with both arms, his spiked boots biting deep into the floorboards to take the impact.
“Meng Shan, hold!” Lin Ke roared, his voice cutting through the whistling descent of the net. “Don’t block it!”
The black net froze forty feet above their skulls. The whistling wind of its descent died away into dead silence.
In the mental sandbox, Lin Ke simulated Meng Shan catching the net on his shield.
Run 01: The silk hits the iron shield. The contact runes activate. Local gravity spikes instantly to eighty times baseline. The distributed downward weight of four tons of tightly packed spirit-silk transfers down Meng Shan’s arms. His tower shield buckles like wet cardboard. Both patellae shatter into white dust. Meng Shan’s femurs are driven through the floorboards. Real body trauma: permanent total lower-body destruction.
Lin Ke returned to meatspace, his throat tight with phantom dread.
He reached into his waistband, drew 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 through gritted teeth. “Main.”
He turned his eyes to Shen Yue.
The girl was swaying on her feet, blood trickling from the corners of her mouth from the forty-fold pressure. But her fingers were already poised over two stacks of magic charms.
“Shen Yue!” Lin Ke shouted, his voice hard as iron rivets. “Dual-thread overclock! No pacing delay! Thread One: Frost-Anchor on the four corner lead-weights! Thread Two: Flash-Incineration on the central binding knot!”
Shen Yue’s pale eyes widened in shock. “Concurrent execution on two opposing elements?! Lin Ke, the backlash—”
“Execute the threads!” Lin Ke commanded. “Or we drown in eighty times normal weight!”
Shen Yue grit her teeth until her gums bled.
She took a ragged, desperate breath, and tore her soul into two distinct, independent channels.
Thread One surged down her right arm.
Four cold-blue Frost-Anchor Magic charms left her right hand in a blinding spread, whistling upward against the gravity slope like four azure arrows.
They struck the falling outer edge lead-weights dead-center.
Tock. Tock. Tock. Tock.
The frost matrices blew up at the same time.
Flash-freezing fields of sub-zero ice erupted from the lead spheres. It anchored their striking force. Then they locked the outer edge weights to the stone pillars of the arena before the net could close over their heads.
The net’s descent wildly hitched, suspended thirty feet in the air by its frozen anchors.
At the exact same split second, Thread Two fired down her left arm.
Her left hand whipped forward, holding a pair of crimson Flash-Incineration strips.
Twin needle-thin beams of focused, eight-hundred-degree Yang fire lanced upward from her fingertips. It crossed exactly at the central load-bearing knot where all sixty cords of the net came together.
The burning heat beams sliced through the spirit-silk knot in fractions of a second.
SHRRRRK.
Cut at its core and anchored at its outer edge, the Heavy-Earth Suppression Net tore in two like rotten canvas.
The two massive halves swung outward, crashing down on the outer edge flat stone slabs fifty feet away from their squad, their eighty-fold gravity runes discharging harmlessly into empty rock.
Silence returned to the arena.
Shen Yue’s arms fell limp at her sides.
Her knees buckled, and she collapsed onto the dark rock floorboards, dark crimson blood gushing from both of her nostrils and her ears as her soul core convulsed from the unbearable mental strain of concurrent elemental execution.
Lin Ke caught her before her skull struck the stone. He lowered her gently into the shelter of Meng Shan’s heavy shield.
“Thread execution...” Shen Yue whispered, her trembling lips smeared with blood, her vision blurring into blackness. “...complete.”
“Roster safe,” Lin Ke murmured, adjusting the linen wrap around her brow. “Rest now.”
High above on the white jade balcony, Zhao Wuji stared down at the shredded remains of his priceless clan ancient object. His face was pale with disbelief and murderous rage.
He kicked the balcony railing open with a resounding bang of brass hinges.
Zhao reached to his hip. He drew a gleaming, semi-clear sword forged from old family sky jade. A weapon that pulsed with the cold, lethal light of a peak fighter.
“Enough games, Lin Ke,” Zhao snarled. He stepped off the balcony into mid-air, dropping slowly within his golden zero-gravity bubble. “If my artifacts can’t crush you, my sword will carve your bones for scrap!”