The world was swallowed by golden mathematics.
The moment the ancient clockwork engaged, a lattice of blinding golden light erupted from the base of the end-post, racing down the spirit-gold mid-air chains like high-speed fiber-optic pulses.
The Mark Phase had begun.
The self-running daemon was crossing the cosmological heap at the speed of sky thought.
Every memory pointer across thirty mortal provinces, nine underground layers, and six transmigration realms was being checked against the unchanging root set. The authentic Life and Death Registry held by Magistrate Cui at the western water gate.
If a soul was referenced in the ledger, the system stamped it with an unchanging flag:
STATUS: ALIVE_RETAIN
If an address was found lingering in swap space without a root pointer—trapped in Qin Guang’s dark rock server racks—the daemon marked the block with cold, cold and exact finality:
