The dust had barely settled over the ruins of the small temple when the world began to react.
To an ordinary observer, the air simply felt a bit colder, and the sky over the Grand Canal took on a peculiar, bruised hue of violet. But to Fang Yi, who now carried the Golden Core within his dantian, the change was cataclysmic. In the vision of the "Observer," the neat, orderly grid of the universe—the macroscopic program that dictated the falling of leaves and the hearts of men—was fraying at the edges.
He was a foreign object. A glitch. A jagged piece of code that the "Supercomputer" could no longer ignore.
Fang Yi walked along the dusty path of the canal bank, his footsteps strangely silent. Every time his foot touched the earth, the particles beneath his boots scattered in a way that def
