The shaking rising from beneath the liquid silver pool was not an earthquake.
It was the rhythmic cycling of an ancient clockwork giant statue awakening from sleep. Lin Tao deepened his metal pen screen, bypassing the high-level application manifest and probing directly into the kernel process table of the Nine Springs Registry Core.
Right away, a huge process identifier filled his sight field with crimson tracking data.
An self-running garbage collector daemon, Lin Tao realized, his pulse quickening as the stone-built design laid bare its terrifying simplicity. The First Era builders didn’t create underworld reapers to judge good and evil. They built self-running memory management routines. Records are marked for deletion. Then, this daemon sweeps the memory registers, unlinks the pointers, and reclaims the allocated address space.
The daemon was chosen DAEMON_REAPER_GC—the Nine-Headed Netherworld Reaper.
It was a self-running Precursor sweep engine, possessing Ring-0 office execution privileges. Once awakened, it would iterate sequentially across the active registry stelae at a rate of one hundred thousand soul records per second. For each flagged mortal record in Sector S07, it would sever the spiritual tether binding the soul to mortal flesh, dumping the raw spiritual essence into the River of Oblivion and deallocating the memory tracks forever.
