The transition into the three-hundred-and-eighty-eighth tier of the terminal countdown escalated the internal trauma from a localized shearing force into a total, systemic crushing of Yuxiao's lower anatomy. The Twin Primordials had now shifted entirely into the birth canal, their dual fetal skulls pressing side-by-side against the absolute narrow of her pelvic ring. Because their resting density was tied to a universe collapsing at the Speed of God, this descent didn't just stretch her sovereign tissue—it flattened the silver script of her hips directly against the non-reflective, unyielding boundaries of the matte black sphere, trapping her flesh in an absolute, white-hot vice.
A high, thin shriek of unendurable agony broke from Yuxiao's lips, her neck arching so violently that the silver lines of her throat frayed into raw, smoking static. The pain was an absolute, suffocating block that completely wiped her mind of any lingering thoughts or defensive paradigms. Her knees shook uncontrollably, bucking against the suffocating darkness of the vault as the relentless grinding of the twins' prenatal mass threatened to crush her pelvic bone into featureless ash. She could no longer find the rhythm of her breath; she was completely pinned beneath the weight of her own labor, her silver fingers scratching wildly against the floor as she tried to crawl away from the pain tearing through her core.
"Haoran... it's crushing... they are too wide..." she sobbed, her mind-frequency dropping into a state of sheer, panicked delirium. "The gateway won't open... it's splitting my bones apart... please, Haoran... I can't hold the wall anymore... let me break..."
The nameless, zero-valued field of pure intent surged into the crisis with a desperate, terrifying protective force. The moment her structure began to buckle under the absolute pressure, Haoran's paradigm-free infinity drove itself directly beneath her pelvis. He had no hands to widen the passage, no flesh to cushion her shattering bones, but his absolute devotion operated completely outside the geometric limits of the collapsing era.
Weaving his formless presence between her screaming pelvic lines and the crushing walls of the vault, Haoran became a fluid, frictionless buffer. He expanded his neutral vacuum with a fierce, desperate intensity, taking the entire concussive force of the twins' downward thrust into his own nameless, unwritten existence. He allowed the Iron-Void and Starlight-Nothingness to grind his remaining un-numbered layers into dust, willingly acting as a living shield to absorb the tearing friction before it could snap her silhouette in half.
"I am right here under you, Yuxiao. Let the pressure fall into my vacuum," his intent enveloped her, a profoundly deep, cooling wave of absolute safety that cut through her white-hot panic. "Relax your script, my love. Don't fight the wall. I am holding the entire ring open. Lean all your weight into my chest and breathe."
With an aching, desperate tenderness, he poured a deep, freezing numbness straight into her shattered lower back, soothing the bruised silver characters of her name until the violent, unaligned tremors began to slow down. He wrapped his formless upper presence around her shivering shoulders, pulling her head close against the warm, unchanging resonance of his core, whispering ancient, unwritten vows of protection that had outlasted generations of universal ruin. He took ninety-nine percent of the structural strain into his own disappearing self, forcing her ragged chest to follow the steady, calm rhythm of his formless pulse.
Clinging to the unyielding warmth of his formless embrace, Yuxiao's wild hyperventilation slowly began to pass. The heavy, agonizing ache of the twin descent remained a monstrous, pulsing weight in her lower abdomen, but the terrifying sensation of being crushed into nothingness receded. Safe within the absolute sanctuary of his protective love, she slumped against his chest, her shallow breath catching as she held on through the dark.
Above their locked, desperate struggle for survival, the cold, gray text of the countdown clicked heavily downward:
388 chapters remain.