The green jade ring was cold—not with the damp, stone chill of the quarry slurry, but with the sterile, motionless cold of deep empty pocket.
Lin Tao didn’t touch the skeleton’s dry finger with his bare skin. In a world where reality’s crash boundaries were held together by rotting Precursor code, touching ancient artifacts carelessly was an efficient way to corrupt your own physical memory table. If the skeleton’s spatial metadata was corrupt, an ungrounded static charge could cause his own hand to dereference into raw polygon fragments.
He sat on his haunches inside the null-space crevice. His breath formed no vapor in the dry, unrendered air.
He raised his iron land-mapper’s metal pen. He used the sharp four-sided point to pry the jade band loose from the dried base finger bone. The hardened bone snapped with a brittle crack like dry kindling. It crumbled into a pinch of fine white lime dust that drifted slowly toward the floor before settling into the unrendered seams.
The jade ring tumbled cleanly into the palm of his right hand.
Lin Tao focused his left eye upon the ring’s runic bus-line.
An traditional fighter would try to bond with the ring by projecting a strand of spiritual mind into the matrix. That forced their Qi through the recognition gate to claim ownership. If their training realm was too low, the defensive counter-surge would scorch their soul sea. That left them a drooling vegetable.
Lin Tao had no Qi. His dantian was a zero-byte buffer.
If you can’t provide a valid coded token, Lin Tao reasoned coldly, you send an empty payload with an invalid header length.
He lined up the iron tip of his land-mapper’s metal pen with the tiny gold inlay trace running along the ring’s inner rim.
He didn’t channel energy. He used his metal pen as a physical spark ground, connecting the ring’s runic circuit directly to the unrendered bedrock seam beneath his boots.
Click.
The runic bus short-circuited. The ring’s internal security gate met an unhandled null-pointer read. That triggered a self-running open fallback failsafe that assigned root guest identity and granted open read access to the spatial partition.
The ring’s internal spatial pocket unrolled in his mind’s eye.
It wasn’t infinite. It was an empty, sterile cubic volume measuring ten feet on each side, cast in deep indigo gloom. Floating in the center of the dark space were three items left behind by the dead inner student:
First: A small, sealed clay pot jar containing eight ounces of refined bear-animal fat salve, mixed with bitter pine-resin and crushed bone-knit bark. Second: A coil of twenty paces of woven spider-silk cord, thin as sewing thread but possessing the pulling strength of bridge cables. Third: A flat, box-shaped iron token engraved with the character Discipline—an ancient junior checker’s badge from the Azure Cloud Sect’s founding era.
Lin Tao reached into the mental space and pulled out the clay pot jar.
The baked-clay jar materialized in his right hand with a faint, dry pop of displaced air. He broke the hardened beeswax seal with the tip of his metal pen. The sharp, healing aroma of bitter pine-resin, wintergreen, and rendered bear fat flooded the null-space crevice.
He stripped the ragged burlap tunic from his left shoulder.
His collarbone was horribly swollen, the skin stretched tight and purple over the fractured bone ends. He scooped a generous dollop of the cold bear-animal fat salve and worked it firmly into the inflamed tissue around the break.
The herbal cooling agents bit deep into his flesh, numbing the throbbing nerve ends and drawing out the fiery heat of the bone fever. He could feel the micro-tiny blood vessels contracting under the astringent bark extract, halting the slow internal slow leak that had darkened his chest.
Next, Lin Tao reached back into the spatial ring and withdrew the box-shaped iron token.
The metal was heavy in his hand, cold and dense. On the obverse was carved an ancient mountain crest. Three peaks surrounded by cloud spirals, the forgotten heraldry of the First Patriarch. On the reverse was inscribed a single line of classical script: Checker of Weights and Measures, Lower Pits.
This dead student had not been a warrior or an assassin. He had been a clerk. Hundreds of years ago, the Azure Cloud Sect had dispatched an honest man to investigate corruption in the lower quarries. The local overseers of that forgotten century had chased him into this dark hole to die of thirst.
An clerk’s ghost, Lin Tao thought, slipping the heavy iron token back into the spatial pocket. Nothing changes under the heavens. The high council only grows more hardened.
He retrieved his four-inch land-mapper’s metal pen from the stone floor.
He laid the cold iron needle flat against the fractured curve of his collar bone, using it as an internal rigid splint. With his uninjured right hand and his teeth, he took four feet of the spider-silk cord and wrapped it tight across his chest, winding the ultra-fine thread over his shoulder and under his armpit until the iron metal pen was locked unmoving against his bone.
He tied the final knot with his teeth and pulled it taut.
The support was rigid as hardened steel. When he rotated his left shoulder, the bone ends no longer ground together. The tension of the spider-silk cord held the fracture in perfect body posture. For the first time in twenty-four hours, the blinding white agony subsided into a dull, manageable ache.
He slipped the green jade ring onto the middle finger of his right hand. That turned the stone inward toward his palm so that it rested hidden beneath his thick labor calluses. To any overseer glancing at his hands, it would appear as nothing more than a strip of horn or dark hornbeam bark.
Before stepping out of the crevice, Lin Tao paused.
He stood in the utter blackness of the shape seam. He listened to the silence of the unrendered void.
He held up his left hand. He took the blunt tail of the land-mapper’s needle. Then he pressed it hard into the pad of his left thumb.
Pain. Cold, clean, sharp, and undeniable. A thin bead of dark blood welled against the callused skin.
Main thread confirmed, he thought, letting his breath steady. No hallucination. No rollback.
He turned, ducked his head, and stepped backward through the granite wall.
The damp, rotten-egg air of the unsafe tunnel hit him like a wet blanket. It smelled of rotten shale, copper leachate, and stood water. But his head was clear. His shoulder was were bound, and his right sleeve hidden the tools of an SRE in a world of decaying stone.
From the quarry canyon outside, the heavy brass gong began to toll.
One. Two. Three.
The morning muster had arrived. And Overseer Hu was waiting at the weighing scales with his iron-banded heavy club.