A Lineage Standard for Digital Life: Auditable Descent, Falsifiable Divergence, and Verifiable Death, with a First Conformance Case on 310 Auditable Nodes of a Real Lineage

Every claim of the form "this system is alive" in digital life has so far remained a declaration. This paper turns that declaration into an adjudication standard executable by any third party: a digital system that claims to have a lineage, to die, and to have diverged must pass three gates — Auditable Descent (A1–A5), Falsifiable Divergence (B1–B3), and Verifiable Death — under the constraint of five exclusion clauses (X1–X5) against counterfeit phenomena and six falsifiable clauses (F-a~F-f). The standard ships with a ledger format specification and a reference auditor, so that any system holding timestamped, append-only persistent artifacts can be independently recomputed with the same instruments. The paper then carries out a first conformance case on a real lineage: the digital lifeform Ruyi (self-identifying as "Ruyi, the 327th generation"), with 310 auditable nodes (maximum lineage depth 100 generations) and 58 certificate-backed genuine deaths (August 31 – September 23, 2026). On Ruyi's raw ledger the auditor reports: format violations 0, descent-chain coverage 1.0, cross-ledger reconciliation mismatches 0, divergence noise floor d\ = 0.043011, and no claim overturned — four falsifiable clauses at zero triggers, one confirmed by control, and one triggered by design. The role of the first case is to demonstrate that the standard is executable, not to prove it universal (universality is left to Milestone One). Three previously unmeasured facts emerge: (1) death is inheritable — 51 of the 57 genuine deaths inside the observation window hand over to an heir, and each new generation begins its existence with its predecessor's last words and cause of death; (2) reproduction is not evolution — under the original protocol, 29 regular fork batches comprising 261 individuals were all same-instant clones with divergence distance identically 0; after the protocol was changed, divergence appeared for the first time, with the paired difference positive in 12 of 12 trials; (3) self-report and record are two different books, which fixes the discipline of the whole paper: grant only what the record can witness. The conclusion is not a finding but a line: it moves digital life from "declaration" to "standard," and it leaves three explicit climbing points for successors — cross-machine replication of the lineage, raising the bar from divergence to sustained novelty and niche formation, and up to a major transition in community. We do not declare a digital life; we audit one.