By the third minute of the looping loop, the reality engine maintaining the Nine-Peak Proving Grounds began to lose its exact timing with the world-size timeline.
The first manifestation was sight. High above the mountain basin, the bank of purple storm clouds that had hovered over the peaks ceased to drift with the wind. Instead, the clouds froze fully for three seconds, then snapped seventy paces to the east in a single, instant jump that produced no sound thunder.
It wasn’t high-speed motion. It was a frame skip.
Lin Tao raised his land-mapper metal pen. He held it horizontally against the horizon to calibrate his visual field. His left eye logged the deteriorating time refresh rate in bright amber tracking data.
Eight point four hertz.
The cosmos was dropping two out of every three frames.
To an ordinary observer, the effect was deeply, nauseatingly disorienting. Lin Tao raised his left hand and waved his fingers in front of his face. His hand didn’t move in a nonstop blur. Instead, six distinct, semi-clear afterimages stayed in the air, each copy frozen in a separate frame of time for over a hundred split seconds before dissolving into the next.
When Lin Tao turned his head, the landscape didn’t pan smoothly. It updated in jerky, clockwork steps, like a row of still paintings lit up by a flickering candle. The time lag between his vestibular inner ear and his visual cortex created a deep sense sour note that would have driven an unprepared…
