The master stone-built modification of Container World 07 was staged, reviewed, and finalized.
Every leech-like tribute daemon had been eradicated. The twelve thousand sky-high sky-trial lances had been disarmed and converted into sky climate stabilizers. The billion-year cyclic reference memory leak had been drained through Subject Null’s zero-byte sink. The four hundred and eighty thousand tera-units of hoarded royal life-force had been returned to the soil. The root office keys had been destroyed forever under the Public Commons Edict.
Only one final physical act remained.
Above the composite stone stand, the three hundred light-projected panes came together inward, collapsing into a single, clean prompt that pulsed with steady, golden soft glow:
Lin Tao stood before the end-post, his left eye analyzing the staged commit log.
Thirty-five seasons of hardship, twenty seasons of war, and forty million mortal lives in the Sovereign Basin rested upon this single prompt. Behind him, the twelve quarry masters stood in a silent semicircle, their soot-stained faces lit up by the golden prompt.
Beside him, the cold empty pocket envelope of the Primordial Core seemed to hum with solemn excitement.
The massive star-white-gold dais, sixty paces across, sat silent beneath their feet. On the floor lay the shattered fragments of the Kernel Sovereign, the ruined chassis of the Precursor iron-puppet that had guarded this console for eight hundred million years. Everything that had stood between humanity and reality was now dust.
