The data chip was warm. It retained heat the way a stone retained the sun, but this heat was artificial, born from the friction of a cheap read/write head scrubbing against corroded contacts.
Li Wei held it between his thumb and forefinger. His nails were black with engine grease.
"Does it hurt?"
The question came from a girl, maybe twelve, huddled in the hollow shell of a washing machine. Her eyes were too big for her face, rimmed with the crust of a bacterial infection common in Sector 9.
Li Wei didn't look at her. He looked at the line.
There were six of them. Scrappers. beggars. The refuse of the refuse. They stood in the knee-deep smog of the alley, clutching whatever payment they had scraped together. A handful of copper wire. A half-charged lithium cell. A can of synth-meat that had expired before the war.
"Yeah," Li Wei said. "It hurts like hell."
He took the lithium cell from the first man in line—a skeletal figure with shakes so bad his teeth rattled.
"Slot it," Li Wei ordered.
The man leaned forward, exposing the neural port at the base of his skull. The metal was inflamed, the skin around it puckered and red. Infection risk was high. Nobody cared.
Li Wei jammed the chip in.
The man stiffened. His back arched, vertebrae popping audibly. His eyes rolled back, showing nothing but vein-webbed whites. He gasped, a sound like a vacuum seal breaking, and then he dropped to his knees in the mud.
"It's burning," the man wheezed, clawing at the mud. "Oh god, the heat."
"Breathe," Li Wei said, pocketing the battery. "Do the rhythm. If you don't, you burn out. If you burn out, I take your boots."
He didn't offer comfort. He didn't offer a hand. He pulled the chip out of the man's port. A string of bloody saliva hung from the man's lip, but his breathing was already changing. *Hiss. Hold. Compress.*
The download was viral. It wasn't just code; it was a compulsion.
Li Wei wiped the blood from the chip onto his pants. He looked at the next person in line.
"Next," he said.
He wasn't a charity. He was a distributor. And the Administrator was hungry.
***
**Sector 74. Apartment 404.**
Su Yuan was drowning.
He wasn't underwater. He was sitting in his chair, staring at the ceiling fan that hadn't spun in three years. But the pressure was there, crushing his eardrums, filling his sinuses with the phantom taste of iron.
**[ Connection Established: Node 18. ]**
**[ Connection Established: Node 19. ]**
**[ Connection Established: Node 20. ]**
The notifications didn't stop. They scrolled down his retina faster than he could read, a waterfall of white text against the gloom of the room.
But it wasn't the text that hurt. It was the noise.
Every connection was a door opening into a crowded room inside his head.
*Hunger.*
*Pain in the left knee.*
*Fear of the dark.*
*The smell of rotting cabbage.*
*Hatred.*
It wasn't telepathy. It was raw, unfiltered telemetry. The SoulNet didn't just borrow processing power; it established a link. And because these new users were raw, untrained, and undisciplined, they were broadcasting their sensory data at maximum volume.
Su Yuan grabbed the edge of the desk. His knuckles turned white.
"Quiet," he hissed.
*Node 22 is panicking. High cortisol spike.*
*Node 15 is having a seizure.*
*Node 08 is asleep, dreaming of a blue sky.*
It was a cacophony of misery. Twenty-five people. Thirty. The number climbed. Li Wei must have been copying the chip. The exponential curve of viral distribution had kicked in.
Su Yuan's nose began to bleed. A thick, dark drop splattered onto the 'H' key.
His brain was being used as a server for thirty separate clients, and he had no firewall. His synapses were firing randomly to accommodate the load. His left hand spasmed, knocking a cup of water onto the floor.
**[ System Alert: Mental Load at 92%. ]**
**[ Warning: Cognitive Dissociation Imminent. ]**
He needed to sever the connections. He reached for the command prompt.
*Don't.*
The thought stopped his hand.
If he cut them off, he lost the power. He looked at the energy counter.
**[ Energy: 0.88... 0.92... 1.05 Units. ]**
It was rising fast. Every second these rats in the slums practiced the breathing technique, they generated a fraction of a soul-cycle. It was a gold mine.
But the gold was radioactive.
Su Yuan fell out of his chair. He hit the metal grate of the floor, the cold steel pressing against his cheek. The room spun. The voices in his head merged into a singular, high-pitched scream.
He needed a filter. He needed a dam.
He crawled back to the computer. His vision was tunneling, black vignettes eating the edges of the screen.
"System," he croaked. "Protocol... modification."
**[ Input Command. ]**
"Structure..." Su Yuan gagged, swallowing bile. "Structure the connection. I can't take the raw feed. Treat them as... peripheral devices."
**[ Error: SoulNet requires two-way empathy for energy transfer. You must feel the Source to harvest the Output. ]**
"I don't care about empathy!" Su Yuan shouted, slamming his fist onto the desk. The monitor wobbled. "I'm the Administrator! I dictate the terms!"
He typed. His fingers felt like sausages, numb and clumsy, but the code flowed. It was the only thing that made sense in the chaos.
He needed a contract. Not a legal one—laws didn't matter here—but a metaphysical one. A binding agreement woven into the code of the technique itself.
*If you want the power, you pay the toll.*
*If you want the skill, you carry the weight.*
He accessed the root directory of the *Primary Shockwave*.
**[ Editing: Source Code. ]**
**[ Adding Sub-Routine: User Agreement (Mandatory). ]**
He didn't write text. He wrote logic gates.
*Condition: Upon activation of the technique.*
*Action: Shunt 99% of sensory data to local storage (User's Brain).*
*Action: Redirect 1% of User's idle neural processing power to Administrator.*
*Action: Encrypt the uplink.*
It was a tax. A 1% tax on their minds.
To them, it would feel like a mild headache, a moment of brain fog. To Su Yuan, with fifty users, it would be a fifty percent boost in raw computing capability without the sensory garbage.
"Upload," he whispered.
**[ Compiling Patch 1.2... ]**
**[ Deploying to Neural Network... ]**
For a second, the screaming in his head intensified. The network resisted the change. The collective unconscious of the slums fought back against the bridle.
Then, silence.
It happened instantly. The noise cut out as if someone had severed a cable.
Su Yuan gasped, sucking in air. The room was quiet. The only sound was the hum of the refrigerator and the frantic beating of his own heart.
He checked the screen.
**[ Active Nodes: 42. ]**
**[ Sensory Feed: Muted. ]**
**[ Distributed Processing: Active. ]**
**[ Current CPU Load: 4%. ]**
He laughed. It was a wet, jagged sound. He wiped the blood from his upper lip.
He could feel them still, but they were distant now. Little lights in the dark. He wasn't carrying them; he was standing on them.
A sensation of cold, sterile power washed over him. His mind felt sharp. Expanded. It was as if he had just upgraded from a rusted bicycle to a fusion-powered jet.
He looked at the energy counter.
**[ Administrator Energy: 1.45 Units. ]**
Rich.
But money was useless if you were dead.
Su Yuan sat up straight. He cracked his neck. The physical exhaustion was still there—his body was still starving—but his mind was racing at overclocked speeds.
"Time to hide," he said.
The Azure Dragon Corporation had found *IronOx* within hours. They had scanners. They had algorithms searching for the specific energetic signature of the *Shockwave* technique.
Now there were forty-two signatures lighting up Sector 9 like a Christmas tree.
The Corp would ignore the individuals. They would look for the pattern. They would look for the hub.
They would trace the signal back to Apartment 404.
Su Yuan opened a new project window.
**[ Project: Signal Masking. ]**
**[ Goal: Conceal Administrator Identity. ]**
He needed a cloak.
"System. Initiate deduction."
**[ Insufficient Computing Power for high-level stealth algorithms. Estimated time: 14 days. ]**
"I don't have fourteen days," Su Yuan said. "I have hours."
He looked at the network map. The forty-two dots pulsing in the dark.
"Use them."
**[ Warning: Reallocating user processing power for complex deduction may cause temporary cognitive decline in connected nodes. Symptoms: Memory loss, fatigue, disorientation. ]**
"They signed the agreement," Su Yuan said cold. "Execute."
He watched the screen.
In the slums of Sector 9, forty-two people suddenly paused. A mid-swing pipe stopped in the air. A conversation faltered. A beggar forgot where he had hidden his bread.
Their eyes glazed over.
Su Yuan grabbed that vacant stare and filled it with math.
He utilized their brains as a parallel processing cluster. He didn't ask for permission. He simply took the RAM.
The progress bar on his screen shot forward.
*10%... 35%... 60%...*
The deduction was complex. He wasn't just hiding an IP address; he was trying to hide a soul signature. He had to analyze the background radiation of the SoulNet—the static of a million dying dreams in Neo-Jiangnan—and weave a camouflage that matched it perfectly.
He had to become smog.
**[ Error: Variable "Karma" undefined. ]**
**[ Error: "Intent" leakage detected. ]**
"Patch it," Su Yuan ordered, his fingers flying across the keyboard. He was coding in a trance, fueled by the collective intelligence of the mob. "Route the leakage through Node 12. Let him take the heat."
Somewhere, Node 12—a thief named Chen—vomited violently as a surge of psychic waste flushed through his system.
Su Yuan didn't blink.
*85%... 95%...*
The lights in the apartment flickered. The power grid groaned under the strain of the computer's draw, or perhaps it was the reality-bending weight of the SoulNet manifesting in the physical world.
**[ Deduction Complete. ]**
**[ New Skill Created: Void Shell (Grade F). ]**
**[ Properties: Scatters the user's Soul Signature into the background noise of the local area. Makes the user appear spiritually inert to external scans. ]**
"Activate," Su Yuan said.
A ripple passed through the room.
It wasn't visual. It was a drop in pressure. The air felt suddenly thinner, less significant.
Su Yuan looked down at his hands. They looked the same. But when he glanced at the biometric mirror on his desk, the reflection seemed... boring. Unremarkable.
If a scanner hit him now, it wouldn't see a Cultivator or an Administrator. It would see a zero. A glitch. A man of no consequence.
He slumped back in the chair.
He released the hold on the network.
In Sector 9, forty-two people blinked and shook their heads, wondering why they suddenly felt so tired, why the last minute of their lives was a blur.
Su Yuan stared at the ceiling. The water stain looked like a face now. A screaming face.
He had just lobotomized forty strangers for sixty seconds to build himself an invisibility cloak.
"Survival," he murmured. The word felt heavy on his tongue.
A notification pinged softly.
**[ Genesis Protocol: Observation. ]**
**[ The Colony creates the Hive. The Hive protects the Queen. ]**
**[ Assessment: Efficient. ]**
Su Yuan closed his eyes.
"I'm not a Queen," he whispered to the darkness. "I'm a mechanic."
**[ Query: What is the difference? ]**
The cursor blinked.
Su Yuan didn't answer. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the last packet of nutrient paste. He squeezed it into his mouth. It tasted like chalk and copper.
He swiveled the chair to look out the window. The rain had stopped. The neon lights of the city reflected off the wet pavement below, a labyrinth of electric veins.
He was safe. For now.
But the numbers were still climbing.
*Active Nodes: 55.*
Li Wei was working hard.
Su Yuan focused on Node 001. The connection was clean, stronger than the others. Li Wei wasn't just a battery; he was a repeater.
He opened the live feed.
Li Wei was sitting on a crate in a warehouse, surrounded by scrap metal. He was eating a can of peaches—real peaches, not synth. The juice ran down his chin.
The boy looked different. Taller? No. Straighter. The slouch of the victim was gone. His eyes scanned the perimeter with the cold, predatory rhythm of a turret.
There was a pile of credits on the crate next to him. And a pile of batteries.
He was selling the access. He was building a clan.
Su Yuan felt a twinge of pride, followed immediately by a chill.
He had released a weapon into the wild. He controlled the code, yes. But he didn't control the user.
What happened when Li Wei realized that the headache he got every time he activated the skill wasn't a bug, but a feature? What happened when the "tax" became noticeable?
Su Yuan tapped the desk.
"System," he said softly. "Draft a new protocol."
**[ Ready. ]**
"Remote Kill Switch."
**[ Target? ]**
"Everyone," Su Yuan said. "If the network turns, I need to be able to shut it down. Permanently."
**[ Designing "Neural Shock" Protocol... ]**
**[ Estimated lethality: 100%. ]**
Su Yuan looked at Li Wei's face on the screen. The kid was smiling, sharing a peach slice with the girl from the washing machine.
"Save it to the hidden drive," Su Yuan said. "Do not compile yet."
He turned off the monitor.
The darkness of the room rushed back in, swallowing him. He sat in the silence, listening to the hum of the city, a million souls buzzing in the night.
He was part of it now. He was the virus in the vein.
And the fever was finally breaking.
He closed his eyes and slept, dreaming of white noise and the snap of broken bones.