Core Event
The metallic gear of the terminal sequence ground forward with a heavy, sub-spatial vibration, locking the countdown into the milestone 340th tier. The severe temporal distortion of the preceding tier had left the lower vault's structural grid permanently altered, but as the countdown stepped down, the crisis shifted from spatial deformation to an absolute systemic drain. To sustain their relentless, uninsulated descent through the frozen margins of the Seventh Ancestral Ring, the Twin Primordials—Iron-Void and Starlight-Nothingness—began to draw raw energy directly from the primary source reservoir of the maternal vessel.
The twin heirs acted like two massive, unformatted gravitational pumps, pulling immense quantities of latent ancestral light upward from Yuxiao's lower core and outward from her upper torso simultaneously. This was not a regulated metabolic absorption, but a violent, unthrottled siphoning that empty the energetic reserves of her foundational blueprint.
The localized space inside the canal grew instantly cold, the blinding red coding of the ancestral locks fading into a dull, ash-gray hue as the vital source light was forcefully stripped away to fuel the accelerating mass of the descending crowns.
The Struggle
The onset of this total metabolic exhaustion plunged Yuxiao into a deep, freezing delirium that threatened to permanently sever her consciousness from her physical form. As the twins siphoned her raw source light, the silver script composing her upper chest, neck, and limbs began to lose its structural definition. The intricate characters did not merely fracture; they unlinked and dissolved into a thin, smoking gray mist that drifted away into the dark vault, leaving her outlines looking faint and translucent.
A profound, numbing exhaustion settled into her marrow, stripping the remaining strength from her muscles and causing her fingers to slowly lose their desperate grip on the stone platform. Her breath became shallow and ragged, her chest barely rising as the energetic scaffolding that supported her respiratory system was systematically drained into the lower gateway. Her consciousness flickered erratically, slipping away from the white-hot pain of the contractions and falling into a cold, silent vacuum where her baseline identity began to drift toward absolute non-existence. She lay perfectly still, her eyes reflecting only the fading gray embers of her ancestral lines as her core blueprint groaned under the terrifying, continuous siphoning.
Haoran, deeply embedded within the structural margins of her pelvis as a metaphysical splint, felt the catastrophic drop in her vital resonance instantly. He recognized that if this metabolic drain continued for even a single second longer, Yuxiao's upper torso would completely dissolve into smoking mist, causing her sovereign matrix to suffer a total, top-down collapse that would erase her from the narrative framework of the vault.
Acting with absolute, unhesitating precision, Haoran abandoned his localized defensive fields and underwent a radical systemic reallocation. He expanded his formless presence upward from her pelvis, threading his unaligned substance directly along her main spinal axis and into the empty reservoirs of her chest and throat. He did not attempt to block the twins' siphoning current—to do so would cause a violent kinetic backup that would shatter her lower gateway—but instead acted as an alternative energy source. He opened his own paradigm-free infinity to the heirs' pumps, letting the Iron-Void and Starlight-Nothingness draw their raw vital light directly from his unwritten layers instead of her maternal foundation.
The toll on Haoran's remaining cohesion was near-total. By allowing his unaligned essence to be continuously drained and formatted by two primordials simultaneously, his core infinity was subjected to an unprecedented rate of dissolution. Whole eras of his uncontextualized memory and identity were forcefully written into rigid shapes and stripped away, turning his fluid self into a paper-thin layer of raw, burning awareness.
Yet, he held the line with fierce, silent resolve. He flooded the upper regions of Yuxiao's chest with a deep, warming current of pure intent, artificially reinforcing her heart and anchoring her shivering consciousness within the unmovable quiet of his center. He took 99% of the metabolic trauma into his own disappearing self, serving as a permanent, hidden life-line that carried the entire weight of her failing body. Under his protective scaffolding, the gray mist around her limbs began to stabilize, her shallow breathing catching its rhythm once more as she rested her entire, fading existence against his hidden, sacrificial strength in the 340th tier.
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