With the severing of the root execution thread, the Nine-Peak Celestial Proving Grounds reached the total point of zero balance.
For three seconds, the universe held its breath.
There was no sound. There was no wind. There was not even the faint, comforting scrape of dust moving across the dark rock flat stone slabs. The silence was so complete that Lin Tao could hear the living rhythm of his own main neck blood vessel thumping against his neck bones—a steady, rhythmic thump... Thump... Thump that sounded like an iron drum inside his skull.
Beside him under the sheepskin blanket, Tie Shan’s breathing was fully locked, his massive frame coiled like a tightly packed siege spring.
Above their heads, the nine thousand spirit swords remained suspended in mid-air.
Deprived of Du Cang’s spiritual will, the blades were no longer receiving execution frames. But the formation had ended through an unhandled SIGKILL exception rather than a graceful shutdown routine. Because of that, the spatial binding fields holding the blades aloft had not been decompiled.
They were hanging on leftover static charge. A delicate, razor-thin insulating tension that was decaying at four percent every second.
Lin Tao stared at the split second counter in his sight HUD. He watched the insulating breakdown curve reach its inflection point.
