The Foundational Ward Pylon was shaking with a high-pitched, ringing whine that set Lin Tao’s back teeth on edge.
Deep within the black Precursor slate, the defensive array was cycling desperately, routing the foreign earth-Qi from Hu’s lodged broadsword into the mountain’s underground dampening grid. The silver runes carved along the eight facets of the obelisk were flashing at irregular intervals. It glowed with an angry, unstable violet hue that lit the morning mist in jagged strobes.
Lin Tao raised his four-inch steel land-mapper metal pen.
To the seventy guards, to Elder Song, and to the scared Overseer Hu, Lin Tao appeared to be an unarmed madman holding a tiny tailor’s needle against an ancient, iron-hard sect monument.
“What’s that slave doing?” a guard muttered, his grip on his spear tightening. “Is he trying to pry open an immortal array with a needle?”
Only Lin Tao saw the internal memory registers of the runic matrix glowing in his left eye:
The ancient Precursor engineers who designed the defensive wards of this mountain had not expected a malicious actor possessing test tracking data. To prevent runaway energy buildup from lightning strikes and demonic beast assaults, they had implemented a self-running load counter.
The counter was stored in a standard thirty-two-bit signed integer register.
Hu’s sword struck the obelisk. Then, the violent intrusion of Qi had surged the register to within sixty-three units of its total theoretical ceiling. Two billion, one hundred and forty-seven million, four hundred and eighty-three thousand, six hundred and forty-seven.
If the value was incremented past that ceiling, the signed integer wouldn’t saturate.
It would wrap around into a negative boundary value, flipping the entire defensive dampening matrix from maximum absorption into total repulsive ejection.
Lin Tao’s fingers tightened around the metal pen.
He didn’t channel Qi. He possessed none. Instead, he lined up the tip of the cold steel needle with the main capacitive trace of the silver rune. A tiny silver filament less than the width of a hair that connected the pylon’s core to the bedrock grounding line.
Every time steel touched that silver trace, the micro-capacitance of his own bio-electric nervous system would register as an extra load event.
One.
Lin Tao tapped the silver trace.
Ting.
A faint spark of blue light leaped from the needle to the slate. Inside the pylon, the load counter clicked: 2,147,483,585.
Two. Three. Four.
Lin Tao’s right arm blurred into a machine-like rhythm. He tapped the needle against the runic trace with rhythmic, exact care. He struck at intervals of exact fractions of a second to match the a deep hum refresh hum of the mountain’s firmware.
Ting-ting.
Overseer Hu stared in confused horror, still clinging desperately to the handle of his wedged broadsword. “What are you doing? Stop! Stop tapping it!”
Twenty. Thirty. Forty.
With every tap, the high-pitched whine of the pylon climbed by a half-octave. He rose from a low clockwork drone into a piercing sound shriek that made the seventy guards drop their polearms and clamp their hands over their bleeding ears. Several of the younger guards fell to their knees on the marble, vomiting from the intense vestibular shaking. The stained-glass court lanterns hanging from the roof edges of the Disciplinary Hall rang in sympathy, the delicate glass shaking so wildly that fine cracks spread across the panels before shattering in a shower of colored crystal.
Elder Song scrambled backward from his desk. He grabbed his head in both hands as the faster-than-sound shriek pierced his skull like a thousand red-hot needles. His sable furs caught on the corner of the sandalwood desk. It tore open, but the pain of the sound deep ring drowned out all thought of dignity.
“Make it stop!” Song screamed, spit flying from his lips. “What’s he doing to the foundation? He will bring the entire mountain down upon our heads!”
Through the shrill, ear-splitting loud noise, Lin Tao’s rhythmic tapping never wavered.
His eyes were fully cold, locked onto the floating green registers in his left eye. Every shaking that tore through the needle into his hand was an expected physical variable. The blood dripping from his nose and ears was simply living coolant boiling off under too much heat strain. In his former life, a software QA engineer didn’t abandon an exploit because the cooling fans were screaming at ten thousand turns a minute. He watched the registers until the counter flipped.
The body feedback through the steel metal pen was brutal.
Every tap sent a sharp, bone-shaking sound blast wave back through the needle into Lin Tao’s right hand. The skin of his palm blistered, splitting open along the old burns. Blood splattered across the black slate. Beneath his tunic, the violent sympathetic shaking tore the healing muscle fibers in his chest, sending painful fire through his braced left collar bone.
Lin Tao didn’t stop. His face remained an emotionless mask of cold, test math. His teeth was clenched so hard that blood dripped from his chin.
Fifty. Sixty.
The black slate of the obelisk was beginning to glow with an eerie, semi-clear white heat. Hairline cracks spread out from the lodged broadsword like veins of lightning, spiderwebbing across all eight facets of the monument.
Sixty-two.
Sixty-three.
Lin Tao drew a ragged breath, tasting salt and copper on his tongue.
“Sixty-four,” Lin Tao whispered.
TINK.
The metal pen struck the silver trace for the sixty-fourth time.
Inside the core of the ancient Precursor pylon, the number crossed the boundary:
2,147,483,648 -> -2,147,483,648
The pylon went fully, terrifyingly silent.
The violet humming vanished. The silver runes blinked out.
For a single split second, the universe paused as the running system tried to process a negative two-billion-unit defensive load.
Then, from the center of the obelisk, came a sound like the cracking of the sky.
A blinding, pure white flash of negative-mass repulsive energy erupted from the fracture around Hu’s broadsword.