The blinding white flare from the console display didn’t fade into smoke or heat.
It settled into a clean, uniform field of pale emerald soft glow that lit up every polished surface of the star-white-gold dais. Standing six inches from the matte gray composite stone stand, his right hand firmly locked around the six-sided shaft of the docked metal pen, Lin Tao felt the high-voltage deep ring across his forearm nerve drop into a steady, calm baseline. The air inside the empty pocket envelope was cool, dry, and pure. He smelled faintly of machine oil, cold iron, and fresh sky ozone.
His left eye pulsed with rapid test counts as the central processing unit cross-referenced his submitted memory address.
The system was conducting an exhaustive hardware audit of his physical vessel.
For a traditional fighter, an identity audit of this depth would have resulted in immediate total failure. Every spirit technique mastered, every drop of refined Qi stored within a golden core. Every karmic vow sworn to a sky sect represented an uncollected memory share-out. A persistent data ancient object that anchored the soul to the decaying legacy framework. The emperors who had stood here before him across thirty thousand years had carried vast accumulations of spiritual waste scum, their bodies bloated with stolen life-force, artificial spirit veins, and leech-like soul-hoards.
