The Crucible no longer felt like a trial.
It felt like a process.
The hammers continued to fall, one after another, their rhythm merciless and absolute. There was no pause long enough to recover, no breath long enough to steady. The impacts blurred together into a continuous force, a crushing sequence that erased distinction between strikes.
Luca was no longer thinking.
Not because he had chosen not to—but because his mind could no longer afford it.
Pain had drowned thought completely.
His body moved on instinct alone, expanding space inward again and again, over and over, like a broken mechanism that knew only one command. Expand. Make room. Disperse. Survive. The inner pathways that had once been meridians were now something else entirely—stretched, warped, forced into shapes never meant to exist.
He no longer felt where his body ended.
