The world began to stutter.
The hundred-foot blade of blinding astral light dropped toward the arena floor. Then, the raw calculating load of rendering four point eight megajoules of volume sword energy slammed into the ancient Precursor foundation arrays like an iron battering ram.
Under the dueling circle, the thirty-two star-bronze channels groaned under total data saturation.
Lin Tao’s test left eye flickered with violent warning tracking data:
The surrounding frame rate of reality plummeted from twenty-four cycles per second down to barely eight cycles per second!
To mortal senses, time itself appeared to fracture into jagged, disjointed fragments. A falling gravel pebble froze in mid-air for a tenth of a second, jumped downward four inches in an instant blink. Then he froze again. The billowing hem of Jian Chen’s white silk robe moved in jerky, unnatural stop-motion increments. Its smooth fabric flickered like a lantern flame in a dying draft. The howling sound roar of the dropping sword blade chopped into a harsh, buzzing, digital stutter—BZZT-BZZT—as the audio rendering queue failed to interpolate the sound waves smoothly.
In the grandstands, ten thousand spectators clutched their temples, overcome by an acute, sickening wave of time nausea.
“What’s happening to the light?” an elder from the Heavy Earth Hall groaned, vomiting over the stone rail as his vestibular system failed to reconcile the jagged visual frames with his inner ear. “The air... The air is freezing and jumping!”
