Chapter 98

Sound was stripped away. The torrent of commands erupting from the Scepter Fragment Core was not a shockwave in the ordinary sense. It was a silent death, as the very bedrock of existence was forcibly overwritten, rewritten, and frozen by absolute-zero logic algorithms. The moment the commands pierced through, the gray-white, filthy mass of expanding mold abruptly ceased all external crawling and boiling. Time froze like amber. Countless minuscule, eroding crystal cluster proliferation structures stiffened in place, the dark green fluorescence leaping upon them rapidly dimming and extinguishing like a candle in the wind. The churning torrent of boiling dust locked into a static sculpture full of tension, the high-speed trajectories of particles forcibly "nailed" into the void, as if countless invisible needles of cold ice had pierced every single "existence node" of dust.