The mandate didn’t sound like words. It sounded like the grinding of earth-shaking plates.
The Seventh-Rank Patch Daemon activated its main directive. Then, the sound produced was a sustained, 60-hertz drone that rattled the teeth in Lin Tao’s skull. Across the seventy-pace anvil of Mount Taiyi, the surrounding light collapsed. The pale high-sky sunshine was snuffed out entirely, replaced by the choking, violet twilight of an enclosed domain.
A Nascent Soul-tier domain.
To a traditional fighter, this was the legendary “Heavenly Crushing weight”—the total, divine power of the sky realm that could force a lesser fighter to their knees by sheer weight of spiritual presence alone. Elders of the great sects would have bowed their heads in terror, reciting mantras of guilt, believing the cosmos itself was judging their mortal sins.
Lin Tao didn’t bow.
His augmented left eye dissected the phenomenon with cold, test care.
“Gravity multiplier: two point four,” Lin Tao analyzed internally, his boots grinding into the rubber heat padding pads as his effective body weight surged from one hundred and sixty pounds to nearly four hundred. The refractive index of the air has jumped to one point eight. Light is bending around the outer edge. It isn’t divine majesty. It’s a nearby physics override designed to restrict anomalous entity mobility.
