The gravel of the southern royal highway ground beneath the iron-shod soles of Tie Shan’s boots with the dry, rhythmic crunch of a heavy-duty ball mill.
Every pace was measured to forty-four inches. Every minute burned up exactly one hundred and twenty strides. The pace was not a run, nor was it a leisurely walk. It was the punishing, relentless forced march of an elite logistics vanguard, kept with clockwork indifference to human fatigue.
Beside him, Lin Tao matched the tempo stride for stride. His breathing remained shallow, rhythmic, and nasal. It was drawn into his lungs in four-count cycles that kept his internal core heat balanced at thirty-seven point two degrees. In his left optic field, the surrounding world had long ceased to be a pastoral landscape of rolling autumn hills and distant pine forests. It was an unfolding vector grid of height profiles, friction coefficients, and a single, unrelenting scarlet countdown hovering in the upper corner of his aiming cross.
[WARDEN INBOUND: 22:15:08]
The Grade-Six Patch Daemon was falling through the exosphere at seven miles per second, carving a curved descent flight path that would culminate in a fifty-league heat cleansing blast centered directly upon the Heavenly River basin. To survive a sky-high purge carried out by the world engine’s self-running upkeep daemons, a strange flaw had only two choices. Cease to exist within the active process table, or enter a padded execution environment whose physical boundaries were solid to world-size scans.
