The Seventh-Rank Patch Daemon didn’t pursue Tie Shan.
It stood in the center of the scarred plateau, its hard-light blade dissolving into thin air with a faint, crystal-clear chime. The entity’s black glass visor didn’t track the wounded giant. Its internal logic had already calculated that Tie Shan, despite his terrifying physical resilience and iron-bone body refinement, was merely a mortal variable running within acceptable physical constraints.
Tie Shan possessed mass, heavy rush, and living limits. He was compliant with the system’s baseline physics engine.
Lin Tao was not.
The black glass visor tilted once more toward Lin Tao. Deep within the dark glass, the sweeping line of soft glow shifted from warning amber to a blinding, soaked crimson.
A wall of red text scrolled across Lin Tao’s test HUD, listing every major reality exploit he had carried out since awakening in the southern quarry. From the integer overflow in the melted rock waste pavilion to the out-of-bounds clipping through the hundred-floor pagoda, the Heavenly Dao’s audit trail was complete. The system had compiled a full registry of his anomalies.
And it had finished that simple physical deletion was not enough.
It isn’t going to strike with striking force, Lin Tao realized. His stomach dropped into an icy void as he backed away toward the southern ring of star-copper bypass bars. When a strange flaw breaks the underlying physics engine, deleting its physical avatar doesn’t clear the dangling pointer. The corruption can linger in the sector’s heap memory. To cleanly…
