The sound inside the Nine Springs round hall was no longer a rhythmic hum.
It was an ear-splitting, metal screech that tore through the freezing air like thousands of iron saws grinding against granite. Driven by its hardcoded retry logic, the nine-headed reaper daemon was polling the empty mortal registers at forty-eight cycles per second, doubling the working clock hum of the underworld core.
The consequences of this total overclock were immediate, violent, and physical.
Classic resource thrashing, Lin Tao analyzed. His boots slid half an inch across the shaking star-white-gold deck as the entire chamber trembled. The daemon is spending ninety-nine percent of its execution cycles servicing unhandled null exceptions. The physical bus channels can’t fade the resulting magnetic-pull heat. The clockwork actuators are undergoing severe deep ring shear.
The suspended green jade rings were wobbling on their magnetic floating bearings, their smooth counter-opposed orbits degenerating into violent, swaying figure-eights.
High above their heads, the black diamond dome groaned under earth-shaking sideways tearing force. Hairline fractures spread rapidly across the crystal-clear ceiling. It sent showers of sharp, razor-edged diamond shards raining down into the round hall. Eighty meters below, the liquid silver pool had turned into a churning, violent sea, throwing waves of silver slurry against the foundation bedrock.
