The Precursor console erupted in a furious cascade of flashing crimson tracking data glyphs, with an ear-splitting sound siren that pulsed at three-second intervals:
WHEEE-OOOOH... WHEEE-OOOOH... WHEEE-OOOOH.
Lin Tao stepped to the end-post, his land-mapper metal pen flying across the copper screen keys, suppressing the sound alarm and zooming into the world-size threat tracking data:
A Grade-6 Patch Daemon.
The self-running anti-cheat gears of the Grand Dao had escalated their response. No longer relying on regional beasts, corrupted elders, or town hired blades, the world-size running system had dispatched a dedicated office guard from the sky-high layers of the air.
A Peak Core Formation sky entity possessing sovereign flight, total spatial tracking, and the power to burn up an entire country sector to quarantine a single anomalous entity.
Its arrival was locked into a rock-solid countdown:
Twenty-four hours.
