The sense empty pocket struck back with the fury of a silent avalanche.
It happened at the fifth minute of holding.
Lin Tao was kneeling on the gray stone. His metal pen was pressed to the boundary seam. Just then, the world engine inside the sandbox suffered a sudden map point slip. His vision didn’t blur. Rather, the entire visual field inverted. Up became down. The gray floor beneath his knees felt like a sheer cliff edge over an infinite void. And his inner ear signaled that his body was tumbling in free fall at ninety miles per hour.
His stomach convulsed wildly. Lin Tao gagged, coughing dry bile onto the textureless floor. His fingers grabbed at the flat stone that felt slick as polished ice.
“Mental drift,” Lin Tao wheezed, his voice soundless, shaking only as a painful scrape inside his own larynx. “The sandbox... Is dropping my neural thread.”
This was the true horror of a Precursor quarantine routine. It didn’t need to burn flesh or shatter bone. By isolating a mortal mind inside an unrendered math box, it starved the human central nervous system of baseline sense input. Without gravity vectors, sky sound, or living feedback, the brain began to disassemble its own neural mappings. The mind, desperate to establish spatial orientation, began to mistake random heat fluctuations in its synaptic receptors for physical motion.
