At exactly four minutes before midnight, Lin Tao and Tie Shan stood at the total map point limit of the mortal universe.
Before them, the dark stone ended in a razor-sharp, upright lip. Lin Tao’s left boot was planted six inches from the edge, his toes pointed forward. His left eye blazed with an unbroken column of glowing-green tracking data, updating every a split second with razor-sharp, heartbeat accuracy.
The map point was maxed out.
One more tiny fraction of an inch forward was exactly impossible. If a physical object tried to push forward across that boundary under normal time flow, the map point math would fail. The world engine would execute an unhandled exception handler, obliterating the entity’s physical memory structure.
Lin Tao knelt upon the shaking shale, reaching for their anchor rigging.
Behind them, rising like an iron-hard guard in the dark, the Ancient Boundary Pylon stood unmoving. Lin Tao took the braided star-iron thick ship rope—forged from pure, high-pulling Precursor alloy capable of supporting sixty thousand Newtons of dynamic shear—and wrapped it three times around the six-sided base of the obelisk.
He secured the thick ship rope with two heavy star-iron screw-lock carabiners. He tightened the threaded sleeves with his cold chisel and mallet until the steel groaned under torque.
