The ninety-second execution window began the instant Archon Xuan Ji’s projection dissolved.
Lin Tao moved with the swift, practiced smooth speed of a surgeon running on an open chest cavity. In high-performance computer systems, data residing in the L3 cache was volatile. If other background processes ran on the host, they would eventually overwrite the Archon’s cached kernel structures.
He had less than two minutes before the cache lines were evicted by normal running system churn.
Lin Tao took his position at the eastern edge of the probe array. His land-mapper metal pen was held ready in his right hand. With his left thumb pressed against his wrist to monitor his pulse, he timed together his internal pocket watch with the steady a deep hum sound deep ring humming through his tuning fork.
Stage One: Target address selection.
Lin Tao pointed his metal pen at the baseline offset he had detected during the Archon’s first IPC handshake: offset 0xFFFF800000000000, the base of the overseer-core’s direct physical memory map.
Stage Two: Risky probing.
Lin Tao carried out sixty-four in a row risky read sequences. For each iteration, he trained the branch predictor with five legal bounds checks, then fired an out-of-bounds risky load targeting the next sequential byte of the host kernel stack.
