At mile four and a half, reality began to vibrate at twenty-four cycles per second.
It wasn’t an earthquake. An earthquake was an uneven, chaotic grinding of earth-shaking plates. This was a sound and physical metronome. Every a split second, a micro-pulse of pure striking force rippled through the floor, the walls, and the underground air.
To Lin Tao’s transmigrated mind, the rhythm was clear.
The twenty-four-hertz base refresh rate of the physical universe—the master clock cycle upon which the entire reality engine was timed together. In the mortal world above, this cycle was barely noticeable, masked by the organic noise of weather, biology, and human movement. But down here, four leagues beneath the land-wide crust, standing beside the bare hardware of the world, the clock was ear-splitting.
Lin Tao stumbled, his hands flying to his temples as a wave of violent vestibular dizziness washed over him.
His visual field jittered. The edges of the dark rock archway seemed to duplicate, ghosting into three overlapping wireframes before snapping back into place on the next cycle refresh. His stomach heaved with the sensation of riding a ship on an ocean of digital chop.
Mental desync, Lin Tao recognized through the pounding pain in his skull. My brain is processing sense input faster than the local physical frame rate can resolve. If I don’t anchor my body state right away, the feedback will trigger a full neuro-blood-vessel seizure.
