The tear in the sky didn’t bleed blood. It bled shape.
It began as a hairline fracture across the zenith, perfectly straight and three leagues long. To mortal eyes looking up from the distant foothills of the central continent, it might have seemed like a silver thread of stray cloud catching the afternoon sun. But to Lin Tao, whose augmented left eye scanned the sky map points at twenty-four cycles per second, the line was an unrendered spatial boundary.
Along that hairline fracture, the natural blue slope of the sky simply ceased to exist.
On either side of the seam, the sky rendering dropped away. Behind the sky’s painted veil lay no stars, no clouds, and no cosmic void. There was only a vast, infinite plane of raw, untextured magenta gridlines stretching across blackness. The underlying map point framework of the world engine exposed to the naked eye.
Lin Tao wiped a spray of granite dust from his cheek. The air on the summit plateau had grown so thin and dry that the skin on his knuckles was beginning to crack. Every breath drew freezing, sterile gas into his lungs. He carried the pungent odor of spark ozone that accompanied high-voltage ionization. The moisture had been fully stripped from the alpine air. That turned his exhaled breath into brittle ice dust that crackled against his lips before vanishing.
