Lin Tao’s test probe bypassed the mortal partition. Then, it struck an encrypted boundary wall in the upper memory volumes.
The boundary was protected by ancient sky runes—the Nine-Dragon Seal of the Imperial House. To a traditional fighter or an underworld warden, this seal would appear as an impassable wall of divine thunder. But to Lin Tao’s test left eye, the seal was merely an encrypted memory partition chosen Volume 0x0F.
Using his land-mapper metal pen, Lin Tao injected a test probe into the partition header, dumping the index metadata.
What appeared in his sight array made Lin Tao’s breath freeze in his chest.
The partition contained eighty-two thousand, four hundred privileged records. They weren’t mortal souls, nor were they waiting in the rebirth queue. They were the old family souls of the Imperial Dynasty. Thirty thousand years of deceased emperors, sky princes, grand royal teachers, and high archons.
Instead of passing through the River of Oblivion to be cleansed and reincarnated into new mortal lives, these immortal souls were held in permanent crystal-clear frozen stillness within the underworld core.
A massive, uncollected zombie hoard, Lin Tao realized with cold revulsion. The royal court preaches the sacred laws of karmic rebirth to mortals, commanding them to accept poverty and suffering in exchange for a better next life. But the royal rulers never reincarnate at all. They hoard their ancestors in private memory pools, exempt from the cosmic garbage collector.
