At Floor Sixty, disaster struck the outside work frames.
The invisible Precursor upkeep ladder came to an end at a wide load-bearing rib of star-iron that projected horizontally from the pagoda’s outside hull. Lin Tao pulled himself onto the platform, rolling onto his knees and catching his breath as Tie Shan’s massive bulk hauled itself up beside him.
They were now six hundred feet above the mountain volcano bowl. The wind here was ear-splitting. That screaming roar carried sheets of freezing sleet and shredded cloud banks across the black iron face of the tower.
Lin Tao stood up, using his metal pen to light up the crash mesh ahead.
Ten paces to the north, the level walkway was cut.
A massive, jagged deep gap of total nothingness cut across their path. A twelve-foot gap where the outside crash polygons had been corrupted and dropped by the world engine’s garbage collection routine.
A twelve-foot gap of total void.
Stepping into that gap didn’t mean falling six hundred feet to the mountain rocks below. It meant falling through the unrendered bottom of the world into the memory wipe-out heap. Any living entity that entered that null-space would have its physical map points erased from the active process table.
