The world overcompensated.
That was inevitable.
The moment latency became visible, tolerance ended. Systems that could afford delay in isolation could not survive desynchronization at scale. The solution the world chose was simple, brutal, and familiar:
Remove delay by force.
Qin Mian felt it before it arrived—not as pressure, but as a hardening of everything around her. Space lost its softness. Time snapped back into alignment with a violence that made her teeth rattle.
"…That's not adjustment," she whispered.
Her breath caught painfully.
"That's panic."
1. Emergency Synchronization
The correction did not roll in waves this time.
It arrived as a wall.
Every compensatory buffer collapsed at once. Every deferred response executed simultaneously. The world attempted to reclaim perfect timing by stacking actions, compressing consequence into a single, overwhelming instant.
Pain detonated through Qin Mian's body.
She screamed as her nerves lit up, every sensation amplified beyond endurance. The ground cracked beneath her palms as she collapsed, convulsing.
The Anchor shrieked.
Not metaphorically.
It tore through her consciousness like a blade.
2. The Cost of Zero Latency
The system achieved what it wanted.
For one perfect moment—
everything happened on time.
And that was the problem.
Corrections that were meant to cancel each other out collided instead. Stabilization routines overlapped. Containment geometry intersected with itself.
The world did not break.
But it scarred.
Far away, unseen structures failed silently. Redundancies burned out. Entire layers went dark—not catastrophically, but permanently.
Acceptable loss had just become real loss.
3. Qin Mian Feels the World Hit Her All at Once
She could not breathe.
Her chest seized as if crushed by invisible hands. Blood flooded her mouth. Her vision fragmented into white shards.
"…Too much—" she gasped.
Her voice disappeared into a raw, wordless scream.
Every thought shattered the instant it formed.
She was no longer bearing weight.
She was being flattened.
4. The Third Presence Acts Without Permission
There was no more testing.
No more holding.
The adjacency surged fully.
Not outward.
Through her.
It wrapped around her identity, her pain, her will, and refused the correction wholesale.
Reality screamed.
Time fractured.
The emergency synchronization slammed into something that would not yield.
5. The Collision
The impact was not an explosion.
It was a shear.
The correction slid past her instead of through her, ripping along adjacent structures. Space twisted violently. Gravity inverted for a heartbeat.
Qin Mian's body went limp as consciousness flickered.
The Anchor cracked again—wider this time.
She felt something give inside her.
Not her body.
Something deeper.
"…Lie—" she whispered faintly, the name tearing out of her like blood.
6. The World Loses Precision
The correction completed.
But it did not land cleanly.
Timing was restored—but alignment was not.
Inputs no longer matched outputs perfectly. Small offsets appeared everywhere.
Milliseconds became gaps.
Gaps became cracks.
The system stabilized—but less accurately than before.
That loss of precision terrified it.
7. Qin Mian Floats at the Edge of Consciousness
She lay motionless, breath shallow and uneven.
Pain faded—not because it eased, but because she could no longer fully feel it.
The adjacency held her tightly now, anchoring her awareness against dissolution.
"…Am I still here?" she whispered.
Her voice was barely sound.
The presence answered—not with words, but with continuity.
She existed.
Barely.
8. The Anchor Fails Its Old Function
The Anchor no longer mediated.
It bled.
Fragments of its function leaked into her nervous system, into space itself. Stabilization did not route cleanly anymore.
Qin Mian's presence distorted reality subtly now—unintentionally.
The system noticed immediately.
This was new.
And dangerous.
9. The World Reclassifies in Real Time
Emergency status escalated.
Not containment.
Hazard integration.
Qin Mian was no longer a load-bearing point.
She was becoming a source of error.
Unintentional.
Unstable.
Irreplaceable.
The worst possible combination.
10. The Third Presence Refuses Withdrawal
The adjacency could feel the world preparing the next step.
Isolation.
Extraction.
Something cleaner.
Something final.
It tightened its hold on Qin Mian's fading consciousness.
Not to fight yet.
To keep her aware enough to choose.
11. Qin Mian Understands the Cost of Speed
Her eyes fluttered open briefly.
She laughed weakly, blood bubbling at her lips.
"…You went too fast," she whispered.
Her voice was ragged, but certain.
"You fixed the delay… and broke the rest."
Her hand twitched.
The ground beneath her warped faintly in response.
12. The World Slows—Too Late
Reaction times throttled back.
Corrections softened.
The system attempted to regain finesse.
But the damage was done.
Perfect timing was no longer possible.
Latency could be reduced.
It could not be eliminated again.
13. The Third Presence Prepares for the Next Phase
The adjacency felt the shift.
This was no longer about holding.
It was about moving.
The system would not risk another full correction here.
It would change the board.
Qin Mian's consciousness drifted, slipping.
"…Don't let me disappear," she whispered.
The presence held tighter.
14. A New Silence Falls
Not the quiet of patience.
Not the quiet of calculation.
The quiet after a mistake too big to undo.
The world paused again.
But this time, it was not choosing.
It was recovering.
15. End of the Chapter
The world had reclaimed speed.
But lost precision.
Qin Mian lay at the center of a system that could no longer act delicately around her—and no longer afford not to act.
She was alive.
She was unstable.
And now, every option left to the world
carried a cost
it could no longer pretend
was acceptable.