The console didn’t ask for a royal charter. It didn’t ask for a lineage scroll signed by the Son of Heaven, nor did it demand an incense offering consecrated by the High Elders of the Heavenly Sects.
The Precursor stonework recognized only one legal power:
ROOT_USER.
Lin Tao stood before the star-white-gold console, the Warden’s Root Access Token glowing with calm cerulean light in its office cradle. On the screen before him unrolled the master domain configuration file for the Southern Continental Basin.
In network stonework, Lin Tao analyzed. He stared at the empty turf field, an unassigned domain doesn’t stay free for long. If you don’t claim the root namespace, the neighboring autonomous systems will flood the routing tables with border gateway announcements and annex the territory through default routing.
If he simply left the vault without establishing sovereign settings, the Imperial Court in the north and the High Sects of the Central Plains would detect the liberated energy flood. Within three months, their royal geomancers and war galleons would arrive to plant new drain tubes into the soil, claiming the rejuvenated land as royal tribute territory.
He hadn’t fought through five miles of toxic rift, faced down the Kernel Archon, and endured living hyperthermia just to hand a blooming continent over to a new set of high-born parasites.
