The concept of an infinite resource duplication glitch was something no traditional fighter could ever understand.
In the spiritual orthodoxy of the Azure Cloud Sect, the deepest doctrine of training was built upon the Law of Karmic Shortage: spiritual energy was finite. The heavens were selfish. Every breakthrough needed stripping the earth of herbs, minerals, and old family bloodlines. To advance, another must starve.
Lin Tao stood before the Precursor pipe hub, utterly rejecting that ancient, miserable lie.
Energy is finite, Lin Tao reasoned internally, his fingers resting against the cold brass control housing. Thermodynamics can’t be cheated in the macro-state. But in a decaying, buggy software test model where the underlying memory addresses are leaking into physical space, you don’t need to create energy from nothing. You simply need to convince the accounting ledger that a single resource has been allocated twice before the garbage collector notices the mismatch.
Lin Tao pulled the Precursor sheepskin blueprint from his spatial ring and laid it out across the white jade check bench.
With his four-inch steel land-mapper metal pen, he traced the logic flow of Valve Station Delta:
There it’s, Lin Tao observed, a thrill of pure stone-built discovery racing through his veins. The classic uninitialized pointer vulnerability in the abort subroutine.
