**Chapter 11: Data Farming**
The library of the Azure Dragon Academy smelled of dust, ozone, and the quiet desperation of the elite.
It was a cavernous space, a cathedral dedicated to the preservation of violence. Shelves of genuine paper—a rarity that cost more than Su Yuan's entire childhood neighborhood—stretched up into the gloom, accessible only by floating ladders. Between the stacks, holographic terminals flickered with blue light, casting long, shifting shadows across the polished obsidian floor.
Su Yuan sat at a corner table, obscured by a pillar of faux-marble.
To the casual observer, he was just another scholarship case trying to catch up. He had a stack of manuals in front of him: *Basic Foundation Breath*, *The Twelve Forms of the Stone Turtle*, *Gale-Force Striking*, and *Introduction to Meridian Flow*. Basic stuff. Trash skills, mostly. The kind of manuals wealthy students used as coasters for their energy drinks.
Su Yuan opened *The Twelve Forms*.
He didn't read. Reading was inefficient.
His eyes tracked the diagrams, the flow of ink, the annotations in the margins. He wasn't processing the meaning; he was stripping the data.
**[ Input Source: Optical. ]**
**[ Pattern Recognition: Active. ]**
**[ Archiving... ]**
The pages blurred. Flip. Scan. Flip. Scan.
His headache was a dull, rhythmic thumping behind his left eye. It had been three days since the exam, three days since he had "tapped" the droid and nearly burned out his nervous system. His body was still knitting itself back together, consuming nutrient paste at a rate that made his stomach churn.
But the mind... the mind had to work.
He finished the book. He closed it. He picked up the next one.
"You're reading that fast, you aren't retaining anything," a voice drifted from the next table.
Su Yuan didn't look up immediately. He finished scanning the preamble of *Gale-Force Striking*. Then he turned his head.
A girl sat there. She had the violet eyes of a high-tier genetic mod, but her uniform was wrinkled. She was chewing on the end of a stylus, staring at a complex holographic chart of spirit-particle physics.
"I have a good memory," Su Yuan said.
"Eidetic?" she asked, raising an eyebrow. "Or just panicked?"
"Panicked," Su Yuan lied. It was always safer to be pathetic than impressive. "If I don't get the theory down, I fail the practical next week."
The girl snorted, losing interest. She returned to her chart. "Good luck, Miner. Try not to bleed on the mats."
Su Yuan turned back to his stack.
He wasn't just memorizing. He was feeding the beast.
The SoulNet was hungry.
Since he had arrived at the Academy, the node count in Sector 9 had spiked. It wasn't just the fifty from the raid anymore. Li Wei had been busy. The boy had been recruiting, whispering promises of power and protection in the alleys and the soup kitchens.
**[ Active Nodes: 214. ]**
Two hundred and fourteen souls. Two hundred and fourteen idle brains, mostly sleeping, high, or staring at walls in the slums.
They were his server farm.
Su Yuan placed his hand on the stack of books. He closed his eyes.
*Initialize Great Synthesis.*
**[ Command Acknowledged. ]**
**[ Uploading Data Packets: Martial Arts Basics (Vol 1-15). ]**
**[ Distributing Load... ]**
***
In Sector 9, under the flickering neon of a broken "Girls! Girls! Girls!" sign, a junkie named Old Han was passing out in a pile of wet cardboard.
His mind was a haze of chemical bliss and starvation. Usually, his dreams were fragmented nightmares of the mines.
Tonight, Old Han dreamt of geometry.
He dreamt of a perfect punch. He saw the vector of the arm, the rotation of the hip, the precise moment the breath should hitch in the throat. He didn't know he was doing calculus. He didn't know his brain was cross-referencing the *Stone Turtle* stance with the explosive torque of the *Gale-Force* strike.
He just knew that in his dream, he was strong.
Two blocks away, a young mother rocking a sick child to sleep felt a sudden clarity. Her mind, usually occupied with the gnawing anxiety of survival, found a rhythm. A breathing pattern. In, hold, out. The logic of *Foundation Breath* superimposed itself over her autonomic nervous system, optimizing the oxygen uptake.
She didn't wake up. She just breathed deeper.
***
Back in the library, Su Yuan's finger twitched.
The feedback loop was engaging. Two hundred minds were chewing on the raw data, digesting the clumsy, inefficient moves of the basic manuals, stripping away the errors, and looking for the common denominator.
It was evolution on fast-forward.
**[ Processing... 14% ]**
**[ Conflict Detected: 'Stone Turtle' rigidity contradicts 'Gale' fluidity. ]**
**[ Solution: Discard stance. Retain impact dynamics. ]**
Su Yuan sweated. A cold bead rolled down his spine.
The strain of coordinating the network was like holding a bundle of live wires. He wasn't doing the thinking—they were—but he was the router. The heat passed through him.
He needed to create something new. The *Primary Shockwave* was an F-Rank skill. It was a glitch, a trick of vibration. It had no form, no defense. It was a glass cannon.
He needed a foundation. An E-Rank skill. Something that could actually be cultivated, something that hardened the body without breaking it.
*Optimize,* he commanded the silent chorus in his head. *Find the golden thread.*
The girl with violet eyes looked up again. She heard the low hum coming from the boy at the corner table. Not a sound, exactly. A vibration. Like a generator struggling under a heavy load.
She frowned. The Miner looked pale. His skin had a grey, clammy sheen to it.
"Hey," she said. "You okay?"
Su Yuan snapped his eyes open.
For a second, the girl recoiled.
His eyes weren't just dark. They were *deep*. There was a moment, a fraction of a second, where she thought she saw scrolling text reflecting in his irises, moving too fast to read.
Then he blinked, and he was just a tired scholarship student again.
"Fine," Su Yuan croaked. He cleared his throat. "Just... low blood sugar. Skipping lunch."
He stood up. He grabbed the stack of books.
"I'm done with these."
He walked to the return cart. His legs felt like lead, but his mind was buzzing with the electric thrill of success.
**[ Synthesis Complete. ]**
**[ New Skill Blueprint Created. ]**
**[ Rank: E ]**
**[ Name: ??? ]**
He had it. The blueprint was raw, a composite of two hundred dreams, but it was there. A breathing technique that reinforced bone density while keeping the muscles loose enough for explosive torque.
He needed to test it. But not here.
***
Su Yuan navigated the sprawling campus with his head down.
The Azure Dragon Academy was a city within a city. Manicured gardens of bio-luminescent flora separated the colossal glass lecture halls. Drones buzzed overhead, carrying packages and surveillance feeds. The air tasted filtered, scrubbed of the sulfur that choked the lower sectors.
He needed resources.
The SoulNet was growing, but his hardware wasn't. The Genesis Protocol was a heavy program. It sat in the back of his mind like a dormant kaiju, taking up space. With 200 nodes active, his internal storage—his brain's capacity to buffer the data stream—was hitting a bottleneck.
He needed an external drive. A big one.
And he needed it to be invisible.
He checked his schedule. *Advanced Coding Logic - Hall 4B.*
He wasn't going for the lecture. He was going for the target.
Chen Feng.
Su Yuan slipped into the lecture hall. It was stadium seating, capable of holding five hundred. He found a seat in the back row, the "poverty row" where the scholarship kids usually huddled.
Down in the front, surrounded by a court of sycophants, sat Chen Feng.
Chen was the son of a shipping magnate. He wore a jacket made of real leather—killed cow, not vat-grown—and had a custom interface port behind his ear that gleamed with platinum plating. He was loud, laughing at a joke one of his hangers-on had made, leaning back with the casual arrogance of someone who knew the world had a safety net installed specifically for him.
Su Yuan watched him.
**[ Target Analysis: Chen Feng. ]**
**[ Academic Standing: Probationary. ]**
**[ Psychological Profile: Insecure, Lazy, Validation-Seeking. ]**
**[ Asset: High-Grade Personal Server (Dorm Room 101, Penthouse Level). ]**
The lecture began. Professor Kaito, a man who looked more cyborg than human, started droning on about the efficiency of recursive algorithms in spirit-webbing.
Su Yuan ignored the lecture. He opened a direct channel to node 14, the former network engineer.
*I need a bypass code for a Platinum-tier dorm lock,* Su Yuan thought.
*Node 14 (Drugged/Lucid): Platinum? Standard encryption. Boring. You need a handshake protocol. Or... you need an invite.*
Su Yuan cut the connection. An invite.
He waited until the lecture ended. As the students filed out, Su Yuan moved against the current. He timed his approach perfectly, stepping into Chen Feng's path just as the rich boy was complaining to his friends.
"...can't believe Kaito assigned another project. Does he think I have time to code a fractal engine? I have a gala on Friday."
Su Yuan stopped. He didn't block the path; he just existed in it, forcing Chen to slow down.
"Chen Feng," Su Yuan said.
Chen stopped. He looked Su Yuan up and down, his nose wrinkling slightly. "The Miner. 892, right? Can I help you? Or are you looking for the janitorial closet?"
His friends snickered.
Su Yuan kept his face impassive. "I heard you need a fractal engine by Friday."
Chen's eyes narrowed. "Were you eavesdropping?"
"I was listening to the market," Su Yuan said. "I can write the code."
Chen laughed. It was a sharp, incredulous sound. "You? You're using a public terminal interface. You probably code in Basic."
"I got 100% on the entrance logic exam," Su Yuan said. "You got a 64%."
The laughter around Chen died instantly. The rich boy's face flushed a blotchy red. He stepped forward, his platinum port glinting.
"You checked my file? That's a breach of privacy. I could have you expelled."
"Public record on the placement board," Su Yuan countered calmly. "I can do the project. It will be perfect. Kaito won't find a single redundant line."
Chen stared at him. The anger battled with the laziness. The laziness won. It always did with people like Chen.
"How much?" Chen asked, his hand drifting to his credit chip. "500 credits? That's a month of food for a rat like you."
"No credits," Su Yuan said.
Chen paused. "What then?"
"Server time."
Chen blinked. "What?"
"My personal drive is full," Su Yuan lied smoothly. "I have... personal projects. Simulations. I need to run a high-load batch process. It takes three hours. I use your rig to run my batch, you get your fractal engine."
Chen looked at him like he was speaking a dead language. Access to a high-end server was worth thousands of credits an hour. But to Chen, the server was just a toy his father had bought him, something to play VR games on. He didn't understand the value of the tool, only the status of owning it.
"You want to use my rig?" Chen scoffed. "You think I'm going to let a slum-rat plug his dirty drive into my system?"
"I'll write the code first," Su Yuan said. "You verify it. If it works, I get three hours. Tonight."
Chen chewed his lip. He looked at his friends, then back at Su Yuan. The deadline was real. And Chen really didn't want to work.
"Fine," Chen spat. "Dorm 101. 8 PM. If you touch anything else, I'll have the security drones break your fingers."
"Deal."
Su Yuan stepped aside.
As Chen walked away, Su Yuan felt a pulse in the back of his mind.
**[ Genesis Protocol: Observation. ]**
**[ The parasite finds a bigger host. ]**
**[ Approved. ]**
***
Dorm 101 was not a room; it was a palace.
The floor was real mahogany. The windows offered a panoramic view of the smog-clouds glowing orange under the city lights. There was a wet bar, a lounge pit, and in the corner, dominating the space, the Server.
It was a monolith of black glass and pulsating blue LEDs. A MK-VII Quantum Core. Liquid cooled. Shielded. It had more processing power than the entire municipal grid of Sector 9.
Chen Feng sat on a plush leather sofa, holding a glass of amber liquid. He watched Su Yuan with suspicion.
"The code is on your desk," Su Yuan said, standing by the door.
Chen gestured to the terminal. "Load it. If it crashes my system, you're dead."
Su Yuan sat at the terminal. The chair was ergonomically perfect. It adjusted to his spine instantly.
He typed.
He didn't need to write the fractal engine code. He had already pulled a template from the library archives and had Node 14 optimize it during the walk over. He simply typed it out from memory.
Ten minutes.
"Done," Su Yuan said. "Run the diagnostic."
Chen stood up, lazily drifting over. He leaned over Su Yuan's shoulder, smelling of expensive scotch. He tapped 'Execute'.
A perfect, shimmering fractal bloom appeared on the holographic display. It spun, unfolded, and refolded with mathematical perfection. Efficiency rating: 99.8%.
"Not bad," Chen grunted. He sounded disappointed that he couldn't complain. "Alright. Three hours. But I'm watching you."
Chen went back to the sofa and put on a VR headset. He checked out.
Su Yuan turned back to the black monolith.
His heart hammered against his ribs. This was it.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a frayed connection cable. He plugged one end into the port behind his ear—a dummy port he had installed himself, connected to nothing but his nerves—and the other into the server's auxiliary input.
The connection wasn't physical. It was spiritual. The cable was just the bridge.
*SoulNet: Migrate.*
**[ Target Detected: MK-VII Quantum Core. ]**
**[ Capacity: 400 Petabytes. ]**
**[ Processing Speed: 120 Tera-cycles. ]**
**[ Initiating Transfer... ]**
It felt like taking a deep breath after holding it for a week.
Su Yuan gasped.
The data that had been cramping his mind, the compressed files of the library manuals, the noise of the 214 nodes, the heavy, brooding weight of the Genesis Protocol—it all rushed out of his wetware and into the cold, pristine silicon of the server.
The blue LEDs on the black tower turned a deep, blood red.
On the couch, Chen Feng didn't notice. He was too busy fighting virtual dragons.
Su Yuan's eyes rolled back in his head.
He wasn't in the room anymore. He was in the machine.
It was vast. An endless white plain of potential. He stood in the center of it, his avatar a construct of pure code.
*Expand,* he ordered.
The SoulNet unfurled.
The 214 nodes weren't just distant whispers anymore. They were distinct stars in the sky of the server. He could see Li Wei's anxiety. He could see Old Han's drug-dreams. He could see the structural integrity of the E-Rank skill he had just synthesized.
**[ Blueprint: Flux-Bone Resilience. ]**
**[ Rank: E ]**
**[ Status: Ready for Distribution. ]**
"Do it," Su Yuan whispered in the digital void. "Plant the seed."
He sent the signal.
Down in the slums, 214 people shivered.
The knowledge hit them not as a manual, not as words, but as muscle memory.
*Flux-Bone Resilience* was a passive cultivation technique. It used the body's natural tremors—shivering from cold, shaking from withdrawal, trembling from fear—and converted that kinetic energy into bone density.
It was a skill designed for the wretched. A skill that turned their suffering into armor.
Su Yuan watched the energy consumption graph on the server. It spiked.
The fans in the room roared to life, spinning up to jet-engine speeds to cool the sudden thermal load.
"Hey!" Chen shouted from the couch, pulling off his headset. "What the hell? It sounds like it's taking off!"
Su Yuan pulled his consciousness back. He blinked, the room spinning. The red lights on the tower faded back to blue just as Chen looked over.
"Batch processing," Su Yuan said, his voice steady despite the nosebleed that was threatening to drip onto his shirt. "Complex simulations. It runs hot."
Chen glared at him. "If you melt my graphics card, you're paying for it."
"It's stable," Su Yuan said. He wiped his nose with his sleeve.
He checked the internal display.
**[ SoulNet Storage: Expanded. ]**
**[ Node Growth: Accelerating. ]**
**[ Genesis Protocol Awareness: 0.015% ]**
The Protocol had moved. It had stretched its legs into the new server space. It liked the room.
**[ Note: The Hive grows. The walls are sturdy. ]**
**[ Good work, Drone. ]**
Su Yuan grit his teeth. *Drone.*
"I'm not a drone," he muttered under his breath.
"What?" Chen asked.
"Nothing," Su Yuan said. "Two hours left."
He turned back to the screen. He had the space now. He had the skill. He had the army growing in the dark.
Now, he needed to feed himself.
He opened the Academy library database on Chen's high-speed connection. He bypassed the student filters using a script Node 14 had dreamt up.
He navigated to the restricted section.
*Technological Blueprints.* *Cybernetic Schematics.* *Soul-Weapon Design.*
He didn't scan them. He didn't have time.
He just planted a backdoor. A small, invisible worm that would siphon the data slowly, packet by packet, over the next month.
Su Yuan leaned back in the ergonomic chair. The fans hummed. The city glowed outside.
He was a farmer. He had planted the crops in the minds of the poor. He had expanded his silo in the home of the rich.
Now, he just had to wait for the harvest.
And hope that when the Genesis Protocol fully woke up, it would recognize him as the farmer, and not the fertilizer.