High in the vaulted dome of the Nine Springs round hall, the Nine-Headed Netherworld Reaper lunged into the breached galleries of Volume 0x0F.
The wipe-out of thirty thousand years of royal privilege was neither slow nor gentle. It was a heavy-duty shredding of spiritual memory carried out at one hundred thousand records per second. The nine huge black glass dragon skulls tore through the gold-trimmed crystal-clear vaults, their serrated diamond teeth grinding through six-sided amber frozen stillness pods like millstones pulverizing wheat.
From each shattered pod, the dormant spiritual essence of an ancient emperor, sky prince, or grand teacher was forcibly unlinked from its frozen stillness register.
They awakened only for a fraction of a split second. Just long enough to realize that their divine bloodline wards had failed, that their old family exemptions had been revoked. That the cosmic garbage collector had arrived to balance their debt. With ear-splitting shrieks of collapsing soul-fire, eighty-two thousand, four hundred immortal souls were stripped of their titles, their hoarded training arts. Their private domains, their spiritual essence shredded into raw, unformatted substrate.
Lin Tao and Tie Shan watched the cataclysm from the suspended upkeep cradle beneath the green jade hub.
In database garbage collection, Lin Tao analyzed, his left eye decoding the cascading wipe-out tracking data, when a long-standing memory leak is finally reclaimed, the sudden release of unreferenced address space generates a huge surge in system throughput. Forty-eight point two percent of the underworld’s total storage capacity is being cleared in…
