Ning Que's body was a livewire, every muscle fiber thrumming with the aftershocks of his internal battle.
He braced himself against the warped metal frame of the shattered Submersion Chamber, the world outside a haze of smoke and flickering emergency lights.
His mind, however, was a shard of ice in the chaos, cold, clear, and utterly certain that something was terribly wrong.
The grand central corridor of the Yundao Guild was a tomb. No frantic footsteps of medics, no clatter of armored guards, not even the shrill, insistent wail of an alarm. Only a profound, unnatural silence was broken by the spit and crackle of static mana discharging from exposed conduits in the ceiling.
A series of frantic, glitching pings flashed across his vision, the System's interface unstable and frayed. [LOCAL SERVER: OFFLINE] [RECLAIMER NETWORK: UNRESPONSIVE] [WARNING: INTERNAL BREACH DETECTED]
