The quarantine sandbox was losing its definition.
To human eyes, the six facets of the amethyst cube were no longer solid planes. They looked like a shattered mirror whose fragments were suspended in boiling water. Every twelve split seconds, the boundaries dissolved into clouds of glowing purple static. He showed the smoking crags of Mount Taiyi, only to snap back into jagged, misaligned planes that left two-inch gaps open to the mountain gale.
The a deep hum world engine was failing to reconcile the container’s crash mesh.
Lin Tao stepped toward the front face of the cube. He didn’t need to run. His feet moved with the measured, deliberate care of an engineer stepping across an open upkeep trench. In his augmented left eye, the wireframe vectors of the sandbox were shaking with violent spatial jitter, shifting five tiny fractions of an inch to the left and right on every frame tick.
“Eight seconds,” Lin Tao read aloud, his voice now clearly heard on both sides of the boundary.
The air pressure had fully equalized. The sub-zero mountain wind howled through the gaps in the cube, whipping Lin Tao’s hair across his eyes and filling his lungs with the sharp, revitalizing scent of scorched copper and spark ozone. The sense void had collapsed. His inner ears, re-anchored by the rush of real air and the roar of the gale, settled back into balance.
