The mental impact of the direct kernel connection was like slamming his forehead into an anvil of solid bronze.
Lin Tao’s vision flared into a blinding grid of raw hex-code registers and Precursor assembly routines. Unlike the Diagnostic Dais this was an internal hardware tap directly into the Archon’s real-time execution loop. It was designed for polite, external system check.
The iron-puppet’s mind was not an artificial mind. It was a cold, ruthless, hard-coded state machine running a single, eternal directive:
WHILE (intrusion_detected) { EXECUTE PURGE; }
In memory exploitation, Lin Tao’s SRE mind calculated within the frozen expanse of a single clock cycle, when a destructive subroutine is already loaded into the execution register, you can’t clear the order in time. The clock cycles are already ticking down. The only way to prevent blast is to hijack the order pointer itself.
He needed to change the destination address.
Instead of allowing the processor to jump to the DETONATE_CORE routine, he had to redirect the execution thread to an unmapped, safe memory address. An infinite idle loop that would freeze the iron-puppet’s mental processes without triggering an emergency fault handler.
The star-white-gold needle burned white-hot between his fingers.
