As the afternoon progressed, the wind began to rise from the Great Boundary Deep gap.
It didn’t arrive as a howling mountain gale or a whistling desert squall. It possessed no organic melody, no swirling rustle, and no shifting pitches. The wind sounded like a huge sheet of dry parchment being torn in half, over and over, twenty-four times every second.
Lin Tao stood beside the Ancient Boundary Pylon. He listened to the unnatural noise with clean, steady care.
Every gust carried a sharp, crackling static. A harsh, buzzing sound texture that grated against the ears like coarse emery cloth rubbed across raw tin. When the wind struck the six-sided faces of the star-iron pylon, it didn’t produce a hollow moan. It emitted a sharp, square-wave buzz that clicked with regular, clockwork regularity.
The sound solver of the world engine was failing.
In the physical reality of the central empire, sound was a nonstop lengthwise wave propagating through compressible sky gas, modeled by complex differential wave equations. But at two billion paces from the origin, the audio engine could no longer calculate floating-point trigonometric wave ringing tones.
The sound waves were being clipped into eight-bit square waves.
Every sound in the environment—the wind, the scrape of their boots, the intake of their breath—was being truncated into harsh, discretized noise. The natural dampening of distance didn’t apply. A loose pebble shifting thirty paces away sounded as loud and sharp as a stone striking the bridge of one’s nose.
