The world ended the way glass ends, not with noise, but with a thousand small betrayals all happening at once.
Lin Yue felt the platform go first. The dark, reflective stone beneath his palms simply stopped agreeing that it was stone, and for one weightless heartbeat he was standing on nothing at all, suspended only by the sheer stubbornness of his own disbelief.
Then the shards came.
They didn't fall so much as erupt, bursting outward from the dying Core in every direction at once, silver, jagged, each one catching some impossible light and throwing it back distorted. A shard the size of his hand floated past his face, and in it, he saw a street he'd never walked, in a city he didn't recognize, where a version of himself was laughing.
He had never laughed like this in his life. Not once. Not that he could remember.
