The exact timing bus of a Seventh-Rank Patch Daemon was a work of ancient, terrifying smooth speed.
To a traditional Daoist patriarch observing from the distant valleys, the violet cage surrounding Mount Taiyi’s summit would have appeared as an iron-hard manifestation of the Heavenly Dao’s sovereign decree. They would have believed the purple cube was forged from total divine law, iron-hard by mortal hands, eternal and seamless.
Lin Tao knew better. Nothing designed by a master builder—mortal or sky—was eternal. Every protocol had a bus width. Every bus had a clock speed. And every clock had an allowable limit for latency before its state machine crashed.
Lin Tao sat cross-legged on the gray, textureless floor, his back straight, his breathing slow and rhythmic.
His test left eye had captured fifty in a row packet cycles through the white-gold needle of his metal pen. The internal mechanics of the quarantine sandbox were now laid bare before his analytical mind.
The daemon communicated with the cube across an invisible, wireless radio-hum ringing that operated at eighty-three point three kilohertz. Every twelve split seconds, the daemon broadcast a 64-byte frame containing the map point boundaries of the box. The six vertices of the cube received the frame, updated their holding fields, and broadcast a 16-byte acknowledgment pulse—an ACK—back to the daemon’s chest core.
