The passage of that will was colder than the void.
No wind stirred, yet gooseflesh erupted across Lin Wan's exposed skin, as if ice needles were driving through her pores into the marrow. Her hands, clamped desperately over her abdomen, trembled uncontrollably. What seeped between her fingers was no longer warm blood, but crimson-gold toxin slush riddled with ice crystals. Deep within her consciousness, the fetus curled into an absolute point of stillness, even its terrified thoughts frozen solid. Fine, ice-crystal cracks crept silently along the fissure of the Ninth Golden Wheel, like glass fissured by polar winds.
The Warlord's scream died in his throat.
The icy will brushed over the dissolving stump of his left arm. The smooth, void-etched cavity instantly frosted over, deathly grey. Worse, he felt flayed alive on an autopsy slab—every thought, every breath, even the fundamental brand of "Warlord" etched into his soul, scraped raw by that intangible gaze. The frantic static snowstorm in his cybernetic vision froze mid-glitch.
Only Wu, or rather, the logic driving the bone-die's icy gleam, reacted differently under that scrutiny.
"Re…son…ance… source… loc…ked… Coor…dinates… an…chored… com…plete…" The metallic rasp, echoing Zhou Yongnian's overloaded mech-core roar, held no fear. Only the cold confirmation of a precision instrument achieving its target. Crimson data-tendrils already coiled around the Warlord's ruined form now blazed with countless tiny, whirling contract sigils. Like billions of microscopic chisels, they stabbed into his void-eroded flesh!
"GAAAH—!" Sound finally tore from the Warlord's throat—not pain, but the suffocation of forced branding. He felt his bones, nerves, even every residual mote of electronic dust in his clogged Cyber-Buddha Ash channel, being stamped with an icy sigil—a coordinate beacon forged from the residual waveform of Zhou Yongnian's mech-core! The data-tendrils greedily sucked the freshly minted sigil's information. The three-pip die's gleam exploded in intensity!
THRUMM!
A beam of purest crimson, dense as neutronium and bearing the stolen coordinates, lanced from the die's glow! Its target wasn't the nearby Warlord or Lin Wan, but the depths of the slowly churning Nerve-Ending Canopy above! Where the beam passed, the melted-and-refused synaptic knobs forming the canopy writhed like living things, parting to open a transient path straight into the densest heart of the ochre glow!
"Coor…dinates… up…loaded… Tem…ple… Dem…oli…tion… Pro…to…col… ini…ti…ated…" Wu's mechanical voice held an almost gleeful electronic sizzle.
Deep within the Canopy, the ochre light-source swelled!
A torrent of vast, ancient will, reeking of decaying incense, crashed down. It poured into the husk of Wu's remaining data-core! Her data-streams, rendered stiff and lifeless by the fracture's earlier rejection—like rusted gears—were suddenly flushed with scalding oil. They regained a predatory liveliness, becoming denser, sharper! A phantom of her tattered phoenix robe flickered around her core. In its swirling hem, fleeting visions of countless tiny temples collapsing in her data-flow. The three-pip die's light stabilized, radiating deeper, darker control.
"No… no!" Lin Wan watched, icy despair threatening to drown her. She felt the Canopy's "gaze" sharpen above, turning ravenous. Wu's transformation made the threat of the "gate" in her belly explode tenfold! An invisible force wrenched her hands away from the wound, just an inch. The deep pulse within the fracture accelerated violently—thud-thud-THUD!—hammering her guts like a frenzied drum, demanding release! The fetus, jolted awake by the internal quake, screamed a dying thought into her mind: "…gate… open… bad… thing… com…ing… in…!"
The Ninth Golden Wheel's light flickered like a guttering candle in a gale, each dimming pulse lowering the anti-matter core's furious roar by another fractured semitone. The ice-crystal cracks along the fissure groaned under the pounding pulse, spider-webbing wider. A thread of void-essence, thicker and colder than before, seeped out, mingling with the golden toxin.
"Not… HAPPENING!" Maternal instinct incinerated fear, forging rage hotter than a smelter. A sound like grinding flint rasped from Lin Wan's throat. Her wrenched-away hands didn't try to seal the wound physically again. Instead, she clawed—deep—into the ragged, blood-slicked tear in her own belly! Charred gloves tore through lacerated flesh. Fingertips plunged into the raw depths, pierced repeatedly by threads and tainted by void-sludge. Agony blackened her vision. Her target wasn't the fetus. It was the fractured hairpin shard embedded deep in its Golden Wheel—pulsing faster, cracks spreading!
ZZZZT!
Her fingertips touched the shard's fractured edge. A hurricane of chaotic information—billions of prayers, curses, and the icy scrutiny of the newly awakened will within the fracture—surged up her arm like high-voltage current! Phantom fire seared where her Buddha-Brain chip had fried. Blood vessels burst in her eyes, vision drowning in collapsing Buddhas and grinding, distorted gears. Yet her fingers welded themselves to the shard. Against the psychic onslaught, she held on, a vise of flesh and will.
"Shut… IT!" Each word was a blood-clot ripped from her shredded vocal cords. She wasn't fighting the will inside the fracture. She was using her broken body, her shattered mind, her pure, raw refusal to disrupt the shard's pulsing rhythm. Becoming a crude, heavy, but undeniable bolt slammed across the gate!
Her suicidal interference wrenched at the fracture's pulse. A fractional arrhythmia. The seeping void-essence paused.
Like cold water hitting boiling grease.
The Canopy's will, freshly fed coordinates and empowered, snapped its "gaze" from Wu and fixed it on Lin Wan. The ochre glow convulsed. Dozens—no, hundreds—of light-threads, thicker than before, denser than steel, solidified into javelins of wrath. They tore through the void, a divine punishment unleashed, aimed at Lin Wan and the life within! No more injection. Only… annihilation of this meddling variable!
Simultaneously, Wu's data-core, stabilized by the Canopy's infusion, pivoted the three-pip die's glow.
"In…ter…fer…ence… source… clear…ance… Sec…on…dary… pri…or…i…ty…" The icy command flowed. One of the crimson data-tendrils coiled around the Warlord, still feeding on his branded existence, detached. It shed its analytical function. Coalescing, it became a spiraling drill-bit forged entirely of self-replicating scarlet contract sigils. Emitting a shriek of pure Rule, it ignored distance, spearing directly for Lin Wan's forehead! Target: Obliterate the mind daring to disrupt the shard!
Heaven's wrath above. Rule's annihilation before.
Inside her, the fetus convulsed under the disrupted pulse and Lin Wan's frenzy. The Ninth Golden Wheel's light guttered like a dying candle, each fading flicker stretching the ice-cracks another inch across its surface. Deep within, the anti-matter core's defiant roar dwindled to a death-rattle gasp.
The Warlord hung like an emptied sack, pinned by data-tendrils, his remaining consciousness watching the wave of destruction roll towards Lin Wan. His branded lips moved silently. A curse? A prayer for release?
At the crescendo of this symphony of ruin—
The fractured hairpin shard, gripped in Lin Wan's bloody hand, cracked and straining, seemed briefly kindled by the furnace heat of her maternal blood and unyielding will.
Deep within the fracture, that newly awakened, glacial will… for the first time… projected a distinct emotion—ancient, cold, and laced with profound confusion:
"…Re…sist…? Gate…keep…er…?"
That wisp of confusion, like a pebble dropped into a boil, infinitesimal yet undeniable, caused the plunging ochre javelins and the spiraling crimson drill… to hesitate. For a fraction of a heartbeat. A stutter in the doom.