The amber warning text on the end-post reflected in Lin Ke’s bloodshot eyes like a burning brand.
HARDWARE ACCESS RESTRICTION: BLOCKED. Required Realm: True Immortal v7.0 (Kernel Master builder).
“Three thousand years,” Patriarch Song would have said. “Three thousand years of sitting atop Mount Tai, thinking about the Mandate of Heaven, absorbing the purples of the dawn and the yin of the sky star-patterns.”
That was the traditional path to True Immortality.
Every ascendant lord in the history of the training world had spent hundreds of years burning incense, petitioning the sky heavens for a divine mandate, and crystallizing their soul into a royal vassal of the Dao.
“If you wait three thousand years,” Lin Ke muttered through cracked, bleeding lips, “the fire room burns to the ground sixty times over.”
Worse, Lin Ke knew the stone-built reality beneath the poetry. Traditional True Immortality was a stone-built trap.
The “Heavenly Mandate” was not an enlightened blessing. It was a proprietary license agreement bound to origin/main.
