The sky above the northern horizon didn’t darken with storm clouds.
It thinned.
At a height of eighty miles, far above the reach of ordinary flying swords, the sky envelope of the Canglan Continent began to ripple with pale golden interference patterns.
It was the self-running tracking data public works of the Ascension Firewall. The huge, planet-scale digital-rights-management rig kept by the Central Imperial Dynasty and the Nine Heavens Dao Trade group.
For ten thousand years, every sect on the continent had operated as an authorized regional tenant, paying annual longevity dividends to the Central Throne in exchange for access to the Heavenly Dao’s proprietary compiler.
Now, an entire regional tenant had stopped paying.
The tracking data had vanished. The callback daemons had gone silent. And fifteen thousand client cores were compiling code without a valid root certificate.
*
