The silence within the quarantine cube was heavier than granite.
It wasn’t merely the absence of sound. It was an active, choking sense void that pressed against the tympanic membranes of Lin Tao’s ears like lead weights. Human neurology was never designed to exist in a space without sound feedback. Deprived of the surrounding rustle of wind, the crunch of boots on stone, and the subtle deep ring of their own breathing, mortal brains begin to fracture within minutes, generating phantom whispers and clockwork shrieks to fill the sense deep gap.
Lin Tao felt the first tendrils of hearing hallucinations scraping across his time lobes.
A high-pitched, metal whine—resembling the sound of an overloaded turbine—began to whistle in his inner ears. His balance center, confused by the total lack of fluid movement in his cochlea, signaled that the floor was tilting wildly beneath his boots.
He closed his eyes, inhaling the sterile, dead gas of the container.
“Gravity is fluctuating,” Lin Tao observed, forcing his mind to focus on objective physical metrics. When he opened his eyes and looked down, his boots were barely resting on the gray, textureless floor. His effective weight had dropped by more than a third. The gravity register in the local sector had not collapsed entirely. But without the global world tick to provide nonstop mass math, the sandbox was approximating Newtonian attraction using coarse, low-care floating-point math.
