At twelve minutes past midnight, the Nine-Dragon Barrier entered total calculating thrashing.
A distributed network doesn’t fail gracefully when its connection queues are pushed past capacity. It doesn’t slow down by ten percent and continue running. It hits a non-linear cliff where ninety-nine percent of all available processor cycles are burned up merely by the overhead of managing its own queue pointers.
High above the Desolation of the Nine Pillars, the sky had become a nightmare of jagged, broken shape.
Dragon Core 04 and Dragon Core 07, their navigation loops fully stalled by one hundred percent thread utilization, drifted directly into each other’s spatial envelopes. The crash was horrific. Their forty-league bodies of solidified sky fire sliced through each other, releasing titanic arcs of raw, uncontained golden star-fire that burned through the cloud cover like acid.
Massive fiery sparks—each larger than a city gate—rained down across the no-man’s land, exploding in craters of liquid glass.
Inside Trench Sector 02, the ground bucked like the deck of a ship in a typhoon.
“Hold the tripods!” Master Zhang shouted, throwing his body across Mirror Unit 104 as a blast wave ripped through the comms ditch.
Tie Shan leaped forward. His fourteen-pound star-iron pry-bar struck the low roof wall with a solid thud. Planting his feet into the red clay, the giant reached out with his massive left arm. It caught a falling wooden roof timber before it could crush the master water-clock assembly. He held the half-ton beam aloft with one arm…
