The infection of the infinite loop didn’t remain confined to the prime echelon.
In any complex, hierarchical system, when a core subsystem experiences an unhandled deadlock, the failure propagates outward through every connected screen. Du Cang’s Nine-Peak Domain was structured with ninety nested sky-high rings, each ring designed to synchronize its spinning speed with the prime echelon via shared spatial map point buses.
The prime echelon’s execution thread locked up. Then, the backup and tertiary rings tried to query the central column for exact timing pulses.
They received none.
Instead, the backup rings received a tidal wave of unhandled status exceptions. Millions of bytes of corrupted tracking data cascading upward from the looping knot between Swords #0001, #0002, and #0003.
One by one, the outer rings were dragged into the calculating deep pit.
Ring Two stalled within three tenths of a second as its query buffer flooded.
Ring Five shuddered, its hundred and twenty blades locking their pitch at forty-five degrees and freezing in place.
