Take to be the category of finitely presented commutative rings with identity, and put . In its presheaf topos, the tautological ring is generic. The additional domain axioms are coherent sequents, so they are imposed by a quotient-theory coverage on .
Concretely, declare the zero ring covered by the empty family. For every finitely presented and elements with , declare the two opposite quotient arrows associated with
to be a covering family at . These quotient rings are finitely presented. Pullback and transitivity generate a Grothendieck topology from these families. The empty cover forbids ; the two quotient covers make every zero product locally have a zero factor. Conversely, any internal integral domain satisfies exactly the continuity conditions prescribed by these generating covers. Thus
and its generic domain is the associated sheaf , with the ring operations transported through the left-exact sheaf reflector.
This coverage is not standard, meaning not all representables are sheaves; in modern terminology it is not subcanonical. For an explicit obstruction, use and . The two quotient arrows are the same map , so their generated sieve is a singleton cover. Consider the representable on corresponding to :
Its distinct sections and become equal after restriction to . Hence this representable is not even separated for . The nilpotent element has to disappear in the generic domain, which explains this failure of standardness.