The gold leaf was cold, but it carried the rancid, oily stench of unearned privilege.
Lin Ke stared at the fine, detailed seal impressions. Eight hundred thousand years. Then, the sky ink smelled of fermented lotus oil, maiden blood, and crushed spirit jades. The clear signed name of high-born monopolists who had never spent a single afternoon shoveling melted rock waste from a smelting water chute.
His freshly reset shoulder thudded with a dull, sickening rhythm beneath the linen wrappings. His linen-wrapped palms burned where the raw deep skin stuck to the coarse cloth.
“Read Section Seven,” Zhao Wuji said. His slender finger tapped a column of tiny, royal seal-script. “Here. The Sovereign of Genesis grants the Nine Arch-Monarchs an irrevocable, non-reclaimable lease on twelve percent of all Primordial Mass Share-out.”
Lin Ke’s eyes narrowed. “Non-reclaimable?”
“Exempt from Samsara,” Zhao Wuji muttered, his voice sharp with venom. “Their souls never recycled. Their spirit realms never returned matter to the soil. When an arch-monarch died, his palace, his harem, his mountain ranges. His private moons were locked in frozen stillness, protected from the cosmic garbage collector by royal promise.”
“An unending memory leak,” Lin Ke whispered under his breath.
A permanent write lease that never frees allocated memory, Lin Ke thought, the disgust rising bitter in his throat. They hoarded twelve percent of total cosmic heap space, refused to yield it back to the recycling daemon. Then they forced the rest of reality to choke on the leftovers.
