With the star-white-gold metal pen locked into the high-speed cache bus of the rotating green jade ring, the entire address hierarchy of Sector S07 unfolded before Lin Tao’s test sight.
It was structured as a huge, multi-tiered B-tree index. At the root sat the regional sector identifier, branching downward into seven country nodes. It further divided into thousands of county registers, clan bloodlines, and single household units. Each node was represented by a thirty-two-bit memory address that pointed directly to the physical storage tracks on the ninety-nine black glass stelae outside the gates.
Lin Tao took a slow, measured breath, stabilizing his grip against the high-hum shaking buzzing through the metal pen shaft.
In database systems stonework, Lin Tao analyzed, his left eye executing the pointer-decoupling subroutines, if you try to delete single leaf records, you generate millions of write operations that flood the transaction log and alert the storage watchdog. But if you sever the parent branch node from the root catalog, every dependent leaf record instantly becomes unreachable in a single core cycle.
He began with Province 01. The rugged mining territories of Mount Taiyi, home to the iron quarries and the old family villages of the stonecutters.
