No mortal body was engineered to operate as a heartbeat clock.
Lin Tao sat with his back pressed against the western boundary wall, his hands resting limp in his lap. The featureless white cube was silent again, save for the dry, rasping sound of his own breath and the distant, muffled blast of Tie Shan’s hammer strikes against the upper bridge.
The physical toll of measuring millions of clock cycles across five nonstop hours had piled up into a crushing living debt.
Lin Tao raised his right hand to his face.
His fingers were trembling with violent, reflex tremors. The high-hum sound shakes of the brass tuning fork, sustained across hundreds of measurement passes, had inflamed the wrist tendons in his wrist, sending shooting pains up his forearm nerve. The pad of his index finger was fully numb, its micro-tiny blood vessels bruised beneath the skin from the repeated moving impacts of the land-mapper metal pen against the unbending floor.
His left eye burned as though rubbed with skin-burning lye.
Tracking the a deep hum frame refresh hitch with the naked eye had forced his eye muscles into nonstop, tiny strain. When he blinked, dark purple afterimages bloomed across his vision, obscuring the amber glowing tracking data glyphs. A thin trickle of dark blood had leaked from the inner corner of his left eye, drying into a crust along his cheekbone.
