The cold touch of the bronze forceps upon the hairpin shard didn't freeze time; it shattered it into a billion jagged fragments.
"Aaaargh—!" Lin Wan's scream finally tore through the gravel-choked ruin of her throat, no longer human, but the death-wail of a beast with its heart ripped out. The agony in her abdomen wasn't tearing now; it was the crushing weight of an entire universe collapsing her pelvis. Golden Wheel toxin saturation surged to 41%, the cold serpent venom mingling with scalding blood gushing from the savagely widened wound, splattering the convulsing inner walls of the bell in grotesque aureate-crimson mist. The Quantum Confinement field's tremor instantly breached 20%, fracturing like a glass dome, cracks spiderwebbing outwards. The absolute stasis holding Empress Wu shattered completely!
The shriek from the fetus's Ninth Golden Wheel reached a crescendo, no longer piercing, but the gut-wrenching groan of space itself being wrenched out of shape. The Wheel's bone spurs lengthened madly in the splintered time, their tips secreting boiling, blood-like vermillion poison. Its frantic 'Contract Parsing' smashed against an insurmountable wall—the stark, cyan-white sigils now blazing along the bronze forceps' handle. Each minute stroke pulsed with a cold, absolute torrent of Rule, undeniable, unyielding. Not power. Edict. Greed was instantly overwhelmed by a primal, existential terror it had never known, and its nascent fangs of betrayal snapped viciously inward.
"Hurt! Mother… hurt!" The fetus's psychic shriek held a new, panicked note of betrayal. Not demand. Plea. Its half-formed Contract Parsing, crushed beneath the rule-torrent, guttered like a candle in a hurricane, instinctively seeking the most primal sanctuary—Lin Wan's ravaged mind. A torrent of psychic backlash, carrying the icy bite of Golden Wheel toxin and the searing instability of the anti-matter core nearing critical failure, slammed into her already overloaded consciousness.
HUM—!
The Buddha-Brain chip embedded in her obstetrics glove flared from scorching red to blinding, corpse-white! The limits of its overclocking were brutally shattered by this internal-external deluge. Fine cracks spidered across the chip's surface, acrid smoke reeking of burnt silicon and hot blood billowing out. Lin Wan's bulging eyes lost all focus, vision drowned in searing white light and leaping golden toxin-veins. The Quantum Confinement field detonated like a silent bomb!
Absolute stasis vanished, replaced by shards of chaotic, uncontrolled space-time turbulence. Frozen space fractured like broken mirrors, reflecting infinite, warped, overlapping battlefields.
"Mine!" Empress Wu's data-screech cut through the chaos, more deranged than ever. Freed, her data-phoenix robe burned with venomous vermillion fire, corruption rate breaching 25%! Crimson pixel shards swarmed like piranhas, savagely tearing into the barbed nerve bundles webbing the bell's inner walls. The parasitized nerves convulsed violently, oozing corrosive, black-purple slime that sizzled violently against the fleshy membrane. The bell's death knell became a dying roar, inner wall corrosion rate skyrocketing—75%! Vast swathes of the dark-gold membrane necrosed, sloughing away to reveal pulsating, vein-crawled scarlet muscle beneath. The entire barbed Buddha Bell ballooned and contracted violently, a pus-filled abscess ready to rupture.
At the molten heart of this chaos, the bronze forceps moved with glacial, unwavering purpose. The jaws clamped down, the 3.7mm depth achieved, coldly and precisely gripping the hairpin shard buried deep within the Ninth Golden Wheel's fissure!
The instant the shard was seized, a wave of pure, unambiguous coordinate data pulsed outward!
HUM!
This pulse pierced the spatial maelstrom, cut through Wu's neural-feeding cacophony, silenced the bell's death rattle, and struck the Warlord like a physical blow as he writhed in the dark mire and heart-scorching agony.
The flickering, barely visible (42% clarity!) Myanmar Pagoda blood-chart in the corner of his cybernetic vision flared as if electrocuted! The distorted lines snapped taut, sharp. The fatal 17° offset angle was violently corrected! The miniature pagoda spire coordinate blazed with unprecedented, stable, razor-sharp crimson light, pointing unerringly down the passage ahead—towards the nerve plexus choked with bursting contract tumors and cloying darkness.
"Tower!" The word ripped from the Warlord's soul, ragged, thick with blood and machine oil. The uncontrolled leak of Cyber-Buddha Ash from his left ear cavity (+40%!) was momentarily suppressed by the clean coordinate pulse. The cracked mechanical eardrum embedded in the heavy bronze bell striker he clutched resonated with a brief, startlingly pure harmonic tone against this specific frequency!
Hope! A final straw grasped in the drowning depths. The Warlord summoned bestial strength, dragging his near-frozen right leg (the grating screech of fractured heel bone loud in his skull), plunging the bronze striker into the melting nerve-path for leverage, and hurled himself bodily towards the crimson beacon! Each step crushed bloated contract tumors; shards of ice-fire agony and splintered sensory memories cut like glass, but his gaze locked only on that blood-red spire. Left behind, the darkness clung like tar, whispering oblivion.
Inside the dying bell, the bronze forceps gripping the shard initiated the final extraction protocol. An irresistible, pure extraction force flowed down the cold jaws, focused on the hairpin fragment.
"No—!" A shard of clarity pierced Lin Wan's dissolving mind, hauled back by this force. Maternal instinct surged, crushing toxins, the chip's searing overload, even the psychic rending from the fetus's backlash! She didn't fight the Rule; she used the infinitesimal space within its execution to wrap her shattered self around the tiny life inside her, convulsing with terror and pain.
Her hands (still encased in the smoldering gloves) abandoned the futile resistance against the bronze forceps. Instead, they pressed down, fiercely, tenderly, onto her swollen, blood-slicked abdomen. A broken, blood-frothed syllable scraped from her scorched throat, weak yet carrying a strange resonance—not a spell, but a primal maternal murmur: "…En…dure…"
That frail sound was a rock hurled into the fetus's psychic maelstrom. The savage backlash tearing at Lin Wan's mind faltered, infinitesimally. Deep within the Golden Wheel, at the very edge of the clamped shard, a thread of energy—Lin Wan's own, mingled with Golden Wheel toxin and mother's blood—twined like the toughest spider silk. A desperate buffer against the Rule's absolute pull.
Then—
"Ke… ke… ke…"
A sound like cold, hollow wood scraping against stone echoed through the boiling battlefield.
Its source: Empress Wu.
Deep within her data-core, now severely corrupted (25%!), as it ravenously consumed the bell's nerve bundles, an aberrant, icy light ignited. Not the glow of data. More like… the reflection off something solid. Within that light, a tiny, bone-like die flickered into view.
Only the odd-numbered face showed—three pips.
As the die manifested, Wu's chaotic electronic-beast shriek warped abruptly! A voice older, more alien, cold as precisely meshing gears overlaid the Empress's will:
"…Pro…tocol… Con…flict… De…tec…ted… Pri…or…i…ty… Purge… Con…ta…min…ant…"
The phoenix robe, a storm of crimson pixels, jerked to a halt. It abandoned the nerve bundles it was shredding, as if whipped by an unseen lash, and violently pivoted! Its target was no longer Lin Wan's womb, nor the bell's energy, but—the hairpin shard buried deep in the Ninth Golden Wheel's fissure, gripped by the forceps! More precisely, the thread of "contaminant" energy—Lin Wan's blood-toxin blend—clinging to it!
The data-stream condensed into billions of crimson venom-needles. They ignored the spatial chaos, ignored the fetus's thrashing, even disregarded the Rule-pressure radiating from the bronze forceps. Driven by the absolute, systemic ruthlessness of error correction, they stabbed towards the shard!
The fragile calm Lin Wan's murmur had instilled in the fetus evaporated. This new, lethal threat detonated its fury beyond measure! A backlash tsunami, vaster and more savage than before, a cataclysmic flood, crashed into Lin Wan's mind! Simultaneously, the Golden Wheel's bone spurs, driven by despair and rage to unprecedented length and hardness, stabbed with suicidal finality towards the vulnerable, exposed scarlet muscle of the bell's inner wall—now terrifyingly close!
THUNK!
The longest spurs, tips dripping boiling vermilion poison, plunged deep into the bell's raw, inner flesh!
Time seemed to crystallize.
The bell's death-throe pulsations ceased.
Then—
BOOOOOOM—!!!
A sound beyond description, a soul-shattering thud of impossible depth, erupted from the bell's core! Not sound. The shriek of space itself breaking! The snapping backbone of the entire Incense Nerve Passage!
From the points of spur-penetration, vast, black fissures, like living veins, instantly webbed the entire inner surface! The billions of Incense Nerve strands forming the passage screamed in unison, the shriek of countless souls being pulverized! Thick, molten nerve-fluid mixed with the dark sludge of pawned sight surged like the River Styx breaching its banks, flooding into the collapsing bell from all sides!
The Barbed Buddha Bell, the prison trapping Lin Wan and incubating endless chaos, its corruption critical and now pierced by the fetus's spurs of vengeance, finally… began to disintegrate!
The cyan-white sigils on the bronze forceps' handle flared violently in the spatial collapse. The countdown to forced extraction pulsed its final beats against the bell's shattering roar.
Reader, the Bell is broken. The Rule remains.
Shall the extraction complete, severing the thread?
Or… amidst the shards, cleave a path to survive?
Your Will is the counterweight that tilts worlds.