The foreign branch didn’t look like a parasite. It looked like an upgrade.
In the mental sandbox, Lin Ke rotated the light-projected representation of his Foundation Establishment layer. The fourteen royal commits were woven into the energetic fabric of his spiritual sea with astonishing coded care, labeled with elegant classical calligraphy that read like ancient royal blessings: Heavenly Mandate Protection, Underground Leyline Deep hum, Dragon-Vein Siphon Limit.
Blame the dependency tree, Lin Ke commanded.
He dissected the four main modules.
The first was verify_imperial_carrier. Lin Ke breathed surrounding Qi within the borders of the Grand Yan Empire. Each time, this hook performed an automatic handshake with the local mountain node, ensuring his spiritual channels only accepted energy filtered through the royal leylines.
The second was daemon/tribute. Every three seconds, three point two percent of his refined Zhenqi was silently routed to an encrypted virtual port—a land-wide drainage pipe siphoning spiritual energy directly toward the Imperial Capital to sustain Crown Prince Yan Long’s personal training array.
The third was the most insidious: trap_sigsegv_authority.
It was an un-bypassable hardware trap. If a royal official holding an authorized Imperial Dragon Seal broadcast a specific office pulse, this hook would trigger an immediate signal segmentation fault directly across the host’s lower dantian.
