The Iron Frame in the Thunderstorm

With a sharp metallic snap, the crossbeam supporting Lin Yuan's footing suddenly broke in the middle.

He instantly lost the support beneath him, and his body dropped sharply.

The sudden turn of events caught even Lin Yuan off guard for a moment.

He had been climbing along the route he had surveyed earlier. The steel supports he had chosen should all have been reliable, so how had this happened?

But Lin Yuan did not panic. At the critical moment, his right hand caught hold of a rusted steel column down to his left.

His rough climbing glove scraped against the column, grinding up a spray of orange-red rust powder.

The steel beam that had broken beneath his feet plummeted from the heights and smashed a one-meter-deep crater into the sand.

"Lin Yuan! Status report!" Meng Tao's voice exploded in his earpiece, mixed with the shrill alarms of monitoring equipment in the background.

"I'm fine. Just a little accident."

"You have three minutes and eight seconds left," Meng Tao announced.

He had only four minutes for this segment, and a quarter of that time had already been spent.

"Have to speed up!"

Lin Yuan spat out the taste of rust in his mouth, raised his head, and examined the climbable points above.

His palm had just started to reach out when it froze in midair:

A bolt of lightning flashed, and he saw the honeycomb-like corrosion marks across the metal surface—like termite-eaten tunnels, where the seemingly intact shell had long since become riddled with holes beneath.

"The eleventh crossbeam is finished." He spoke softly, with a hint of bitterness in his voice. "Oxidation depth exceeds eight millimeters. Load-bearing coefficient is below the safety threshold."

There had only been a few usable steel support points between the eleventh and twelfth crossbeams to