With the leech-like tribute loops cut and the sky-high sky-trial lances disarmed, Lin Tao arrived at the deepest technical disaster that had haunted Container World 07 since antiquity: the cosmic memory leak.
Directly before his eyes, pulsing in deep amber across forty light-projected panes, hung the central memory management module: /kernel/mm/soul_recycle.c.
Lin Tao opened the ancient Precursor source code.
Written one point four billion years ago by the Precursor systems master builders, the subroutine was responsible for the foundational conservation of matter, energy, and mind across the entire simulated universe:
Lin Tao traced the execution logic with cold, test care.
The flaw was breathtaking in its simplicity. When a conscious living organism died within Container World 07, the system routine was designed to wipe its specific memory registers, dissolve its physical boundary envelope, and return its refined life-force to the universal heap.
However, the Precursor developers had introduced a circular dependency between the identity reference pointer and the emotional attachment buffer.
When an entity perished with unresolved earthly desires, hatred, or deep karmic ties, the identity pointer cleared. But the emotional buffer kept a dangling reference to the parent stack frame. Because the reference count never reached total zero, the universal garbage collector skipped the share-out. The memory was never freed back to the system pool.
