Ninety seconds later, the queue consumption curve breached the sharp-angled threshold.
High above the plain, the Nine-Dragon Barrier was no longer humming with its clean, twenty-four-hertz deep drone. The sound had degenerated into a ragged, shrieking screech. The sound of an overloaded clockwork turbine tearing its own bronze bearings apart. The golden curtain of light between the earth and the heavens was shivering wildly, covered in level tearing artifacts that rippled across forty leagues of front.
Lin Tao stood beside the master water-clock, his left eye glowing with amber tracking data.
Over eight point nine million active half-open connections, Lin Tao observed with the calm distance of an autopsy surgeon. The firewall’s memory controllers are thrashing. Every single one of those nine million entries is actively attempting to retry its acknowledgment handshake every four seconds. The system is generating nearly two million outbound proof pings every second into empty space, consuming its own signal bus bandwidth.
The sky defenses were now caught in a total positive feedback loop.
The outgoing acknowledgment pings were ignored by the inanimate copper mirrors. Because of that, the barrier assumed that the incoming entities were experiencing signal delays. Under its ancient Precursor retry policy, it began re-transmitting the acknowledgments with higher priority and increased signal strength, flooding its own internal bus with duplicate signals.
