Lin Tao advanced the end-post to the memory share-out ledgers of Epoch Nine hundred.
The green glowing display right away filled with red test warning markers. The clean, balanced resource curves of the early epochs had degenerated into chaotic, jagged saw-tooth patterns, showing a steady, total depletion of the cosmos’s free energy reserves.
“Ninety-eight point nine percent of the world’s vital energy is locked in stale memory pools,” Lin Tao muttered. His fingers tapped the composite casing in rapid math.
“What’s choking the well?” Tie Shan asked, his pry-bar resting firm against his boots.
“A fatal flaw in the soul recycling subroutine,” Lin Tao replied. He pulled up the execution trace of the ancient garbage collection daemon. “Look at the gearwork. When an ordinary mortal dies, their mind dissolves naturally, and their piled up life-force returns to the soil within forty-nine days. But when an entity develops intense emotional attachments, deep obsessions, or karmic vows, their soul-signed name forms a cyclic reference.”
Lin Tao drew a simple circular diagram on the matte gray stone stand with a piece of white spirit chalk.
“Entity An anchors its memory to Entity B,” Lin Tao explained to Tie Shan and the listening quarry masters. “Entity B anchors its memory back to Entity A. Under standard self-running collection routines, a cleaner process can’t deallocate a memory block if another active block is pointing to it. Because both blocks reference each other, the self-running reaper skips over them, assuming they’re still in active use.”
