The impact with the mountain stone drove the breath from Lin Tao’s chest in a violent, rattling cough.
He rolled across jagged slabs of frosted granite, the rough minerals tearing through the frayed sleeves of his linen coat. His boots scraped for purchase against an ancient flat stone slab of polished jadeite. He skidded three paces before friction arrested his forward driving force.
Cold air rushed into his throat. It wasn’t the man-made, scentless air of the overseer-core sandbox. This air was sharp, thin, and freezing, carrying the biting scent of ozone, high-sky snow, and crushed slate.
Lin Tao lay face down against the stone for five seconds, his forehead pressed against the freezing rock.
Every nerve ending along his chest cage flared with searing agony. The fourth rib on his left lateral arch had suffered a hairline fracture during the violent slowdown of the forced context switch. His left palm was raw and bleeding, the skin tissue stripped away when his grip slipped from the unrendered shape of the sandbox threshold.
Yet beneath the physical pain, there was a total, crystal-clear stillness.
He was out.
The Ring-3 overseer-core sandbox was behind him. The execution thread had returned to the host environment, dumping his physical mass onto the raw, unrendered mountain terraces of the Upper Heavens.
