Lin Tao and Tie Shan advanced along the outer edge of the frozen barrier. Then, the physical consequences of total state deadlock became startlingly clear.
Under normal operation, the Nine-Dragon Firewall was an active, self-healing water-flow field. Striking force or spiritual force struck a particular map point. Then, the nine dragon cores dynamically pooled their bandwidth, routing calculating power from idle sectors to reinforce the impact zone. But with every core frozen at one hundred percent memory saturation, dynamic load balancing had ceased entirely.
Where Dragon Core 01 met Dragon Core 02, thirty paces east of the central highway, the golden curtain had fully broken apart.
A jagged upright fissure, twenty paces wide and extending from the earth to the upper clouds, tore through the barrier like a wound in the flesh of the world. Inside the fissure, there was no golden light, no defensive shield, and no spiritual pushback. There was only a pitch-black void. A dead rendering seam where the universe had simply failed to calculate spatial physics.
Lin Tao knelt at the edge of the blackout seam. He swept away loose limestone gravel with his gloved fingers.
“Notice the edge of the tear, Tie Shan,” Lin Tao said. He held his brass measuring tongs to the black glass lip. “The boundary isn’t melted or shattered. It’s cut cleanly, as if cut by a lapidary’s saw. The map points on this side belong to Sector One. The map points on the other side belong to Sector Two. Because…
