The cold didn’t blow like wind. It deleted heat from the universe.
Lin Ke felt the blood in his lips turn to frost in the space of half a heartbeat. Beside him, a brass lantern resting on an iron crate didn’t freeze—the atom-deep bonds holding the metal together simply lost their focus, the lantern collapsing into a small heap of fine, grey, room-heat dust.
The Sovereign of Genesis had stalled, and the self-running kernel had drawn the logical conclusion.
If the Write Daemon had completed its cycle or timed out, then the Delete Daemon was scheduled to run.
To the west, the huge black glass vortex of the Sovereign of Oblivion began to spin with terrifying, faster-than-sound angular driving force. A flat, black ripple—a space-folding blast wave that sucked every photon and every echo out of the chamber—spread across the dark rock floor.
It was a self-running garbage collection sweep.
A global, unbuffered free() command, executing across ten thousand light-years of space, designed to deallocate all stale memory objects and reclaim their spiritual mass for the next epoch.
A scout twenty paces to the left of the command post stepped out of the warding zone.
