# World Bible — *(working title: The Salt Ledger)*
Held as living material. Nothing here is locked; everything is meant to be deepened, contradicted, or cut as the opening chapters teach me what the story actually needs. I am keeping more than the page will ever use, because the Necessity Filter says only what touches a character's wound, the conflict, or the theme earns ink. The rest stays here, in notes, doing quiet work.
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## 1. The Novum
One central point of difference, and I will resist the urge to add a second until the first has paid for itself.
**The novum: memory can be precipitated out of a person and stored as salt.**
A technology — call it the *ledger process* — that extracts specific memories from a living brain and crystallizes them into small grey-white grains. The memory leaves the person who gave it. The grains can be held, traded, inherited, dissolved back into another person (who then *remembers* it as if it happened to them), or simply lost.
I am keeping this deliberately narrow. Not "all of consciousness," not uploading, not immortality — just discrete memories, made into a substance that can be weighed, spent, and stolen. That narrowness is what makes it extrapolable rather than magical: it behaves like a commodity because it *is* one. Everything in the world should follow from that single rule, the way Extrapolation worldbuilding asks: stay inside the bounds of one plausible change and follow it honestly to its consequences.
**Consequences I want the world to have already absorbed** (so I can filter them through POV rather than explain them):
- Memory has a market price. The poor sell theirs. The rich buy other people's.
- A person can be made innocent — or guilty — by what has been added to or taken from them.
- Identity becomes something you can be in debt over.
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## 2. Setting
A single salt city, **Brine**, built where an inland sea evaporated. I am resisting a galaxy; a novella holds one place well and many places badly.
- The ledger process requires brine as its medium, so the whole economy grew up around the dry sea-pan.
- The city is terraced down into the old seabed; the deeper you live, the further from clean air and the closer to the **pans** where extraction happens.
- Time/tech feel: near-future-adjacent but worn, industrial, not chrome. I want salt crust on everything — a sensory anchor I can return to instead of explaining the science.
I will use **steep worldbuilding** where my POV characters are natives (they don't explain what they take for granted), and lean **shallow** only if a newcomer character earns their place. Trusting the reader to keep up is cheaper than stopping to teach.
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## 3. Rules (the discipline I hold myself to)
1. A memory removed is *gone* from the giver — no back
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