The blueprint was not drawn in blood or divine ink.
It was drawn with a chunk of white calcium chalk and a handful of grey lead powder directly onto the shaking brass deck of the Primordial Dais.
Lin Ke knelt amid the bone-shaking tremors of the falling sky, his fingers moving with swift, cold and exact shape.
“Listen to the stonework,” Lin Ke said. His voice carried clearly over the grinding howl of the seized clockwork. “This isn’t a spell. It’s a distributed mark-and-sweep garbage collector. It needs three concurrent physical anchors to execute. Or the backing-up pressure will tear the underworld apart.”
Zhao Wuji, Magistrate Cui, and Shen Yue leaned close. Their eyes were wide as they followed the lines of chalk.
“Anchor One,” Lin Ke said, pointing his chalk at the blueprint’s western node. “The Root Set. Magistrate Cui, you hold the Life and Death Ledger in your storage box. That ledger contains the authentic root pointers—every living mortal soul officially registered in the cosmos. If we don’t anchor the sweep to that root set, the algorithm will deallocate seventy million living mortals by mistake.”
Cui nodded wildly, clutching his velvet-lined strongbox to his chest. “The ledger is uncorrupted! I have the master seals!”
