Lin Tao wiped a fleck of blood from his metal pen tip. That turned his test left eye back toward the core’s kernel process table.
Amid the cascading storm of red exception alerts, a single Precursor execution register was flashing amber at the bottom of the execution stack. It was chosen FALLBACK_REGISTER_0x0A.
In high-availability batch processing, Lin Tao analyzed, his thoughts razor-sharp against the ear-splitting roar of the thrashing reaper, when a main storage partition returns persistent null read errors, the scheduler doesn’t crash the entire daemon. It looks for an alternate target address in the fallback register to resume processing before throwing a fatal panic.
Currently, that fallback register was set to 0x00000000—unbound and empty.
If Lin Tao could overwrite that register with the memory address of Volume 0x0F—the encrypted partition holding the eighty-two thousand royal ancestors—the reaper’s scanning heads would automatically pivot away from the empty mortal provinces and lock onto the gold-trimmed tombs of the dead emperors!
Tie Shan stepped up beside him, his torn leather harness flapping in the freezing wind, his bloody hands gripping his pry-bar with rock-steady resolve.
“Redirect the dragon’s hunger,” Tie Shan said, his dark eyes locking onto the flashing register.
“We redirect the signposts,” Lin Tao replied, gesturing toward the encrypted upper memory volume. “The royal court believed they were untouchable behind their Nine-Dragon sky seals. But this reaper operates with Ring-0 office privileges. It doesn’t recognize divine power. It recognizes only the law of wipe-out.”
