At the highest tier of the active execution tree hovered two massive, leech-like background routines.
Their process identifiers burned with an ugly, corrupt violet soft glow that clashed wildly with the clean emerald glow of the Precursor source code: DAEMON_IMPERIAL_TRIBUTE and PROCESS_CELESTIAL_SIPHON.
Lin Tao stood beside the composite stone stand, the soles of his iron-shod boots firmly planted on the star-white-gold deck plates. The air within the empty pocket envelope was freezing cold. He smelled of scorched heat padding, powdered diamond melted rock waste, and stale machine lubricant. High above, through the see-through crystal dome of the Primordial Core, the distant nebulae pulsed with a faint, sickly purple twitch—the visible sight deep ring of the royal drain.
He raised his star-white-gold land-mapper metal pen and traced the execution threads with his test sight array:
The numbers revealed the full horror of royal rule across thirty thousand years.
For thirty thousand years, the Nine-Dragon Celestial Court had not ruled through virtue, wisdom, or spiritual enlightenment. They had simply pushed in a self-running extraction loop into the world-size metabolism. Every time a child took its first breath in the mortal valleys of the Sovereign Basin, ninety-four point two percent of its potential lifespan was siphoned directly into the high reservoirs of the Heavenly Citadel.
