The star-white-gold metal pen seated into the six-sided jade socket. Then, a blinding pulse of pale amber light erupted from the stone stand.
A wave of spark current surged up the metal pen shaft, causing Lin Tao’s arm muscles to contract involuntarily. But his permanent 0-byte Dantian buffer acted as a total insulator. The surge found zero spiritual reserves to ground through. It drained away harmlessly along his skin into the star-white-gold platform beneath his iron-toed boots. In his left eye, the test screen roared to life.
Dense columns of amber hex-code data cascaded through his eye nerve, moving with the speed of an avalanche.
The entire underworld is running on an unnormalized relational database, Lin Tao realized, his breath shallow as he parsed the incoming data structures. Sixteen logical partitions, structured in an ancient Precursor runic lattice. It doesn’t treat living beings as spirit spirits. It stores them as relational index rows linked by foreign key constraints.
Lin Tao focused his eye nerve, switching his test lens through three levels of visual zoom.
At sixteen times zoom, the tiny runic lattice resolved into discrete data sectors. The Precursor master builders had not built a ghostly realm of spirits. They had built a cold, industrialized registry to monitor and exploit the living resources of a conquered planet. Every mortal family was indexed under a main country node, with sub-tables logging agricultural yield, tax unpaid debts, and karmic debt balances.
