Chapter 13: E-Rank: Flowing Mercury Steps
The training grounds of the Azure Dragon Academy were a graveyard of silence at three in the morning. The moon was hidden behind the perpetual smog layer, leaving the open-air arena bathed in the clinical, shadowless glow of the perimeter floodlights.
Su Yuan stood at the starting line of the Obstacle Course—Sector 7.
It was a gauntlet designed for agility builds. Spinning blades of dull carbon-fiber, uneven terrain that shifted hydraulically, and pressurized air cannons firing randomized blasts of concussive force.
He checked his internal clock.
**[ 03:14:02 AM ]**
His body ached. The fight with Iron Ox was twelve hours ago, and while the credits were safe in an encrypted account, the bruising on his ribs was a vivid purple. The bio-gel he'd bought from a vending machine was working, but slowly.
"System," Su Yuan whispered. The vapor of his breath vanished instantly in the dry air. "Load the new profile."
**[ Acknowledging. ]**
**[ Skill: Flowing Mercury Steps (Rank E). ]**
**[ Status: Experimental. ]**
**[ Synthesis Source: 1,418 Nodes. ]**
**[ Activation Cost: 0.8 Soul Units/Second. ]**
It was expensive. Nearly a full unit per second. Two days ago, that would have killed him. Now, with the fourteen hundred souls humming in the background of his mind like a server farm running hot, it was a drop in the bucket.
"Engage."
The sensation wasn't an explosion of power. It wasn't the violent vibration of the *Primary Shockwave*.
It was a sudden, sickening loss of friction.
Su Yuan took a step.
Usually, when a foot hits gravel, there is resistance. There is the push of the earth, the drag of the air against the shins.
That vanished.
He didn't run. He *poured* forward.
The first obstacle was a set of rotating pillars. They spun at forty miles per hour, leaving gaps barely wide enough for a human torso.
Su Yuan didn't calculate the gap. He didn't need to. The skill did it for him.
His body felt heavy, dense, yet paradoxically formless. He was a bag of water thrown off a cliff.
He hit the gap.
A normal runner would have braced, tensed their shoulders, prepared for impact. Su Yuan's center of gravity liquefied. He slid between the spinning carbon poles with millimeters to spare. The wind form the pillars tugged at his jacket, but his body adjusted instantly, rolling with the turbulence rather than fighting it.
*Too fast,* he thought.
He was approaching the hydraulic floor. The ground bucked upward, a slab of concrete rising to knee height.
He didn't jump.
His lead foot hit the rising slab, and instead of jarring his knee, his momentum transferred. He flowed up the vertical face of the concrete like oil running in reverse. He crested the top and slid down the other side without a sound.
No footfalls. No heavy breathing. Just the hiss of fabric cutting air.
Then came the air cannons.
*Thump. Thump.*
Invisible hammers of compressed air slammed into the space where he should have been.
Su Yuan saw the distortion in the air. The *Flowing Mercury Steps* wasn't just a movement technique; it was a sensory alteration. He could feel the air pressure changes on his skin before they arrived.
He twisted.
His spine seemed to elongate, his torso bending at an angle that should have snapped vertebrae. The air blast grazed his shoulder.
Instead of knocking him back, the impact pushed him forward. He rode the kinetic energy of the attack, accelerating.
He reached the finish line.
He tried to stop.
That was the problem with being liquid. Liquids don't have brakes.
He skidded, his boots sliding across the astroturf with zero traction. He slammed into the crash barrier at the end of the track.
*Wham.*
The impact knocked the wind out of him. He crumpled to the turf, gasping.
**[ Test Complete. ]**
**[ Duration: 14 Seconds. ]**
**[ Efficiency: 88%. ]**
**[ User Damage: Minor bruising. ]**
Su Yuan lay on his back, staring up at the blinding floodlights. He started to laugh. It was a breathless, jagged sound.
Fourteen seconds. The Academy record for the Sector 7 gauntlet was eighteen seconds, held by a third-year student with Type-II leg hydraulics.
He had beaten it by four seconds with flesh and bone.
"It works," he wheezed.
He sat up, wincing as his ribs protested.
This wasn't speed. Speed was linear. Speed was force. This was *evasion*. It was the path of least resistance made manifest.
"Hide it," he said aloud.
**[ Protocol Confirmed. Archiving 'Flowing Mercury Steps'. ]**
**[ Designation: Ace. ]**
**[ Usage Condition: Life or Death. ]**
He couldn't show this. If Instructor Lin saw him moving like a puddle of quicksilver, she wouldn't just be suspicious; she'd be terrified. This wasn't a standard cultivation technique. It looked... wrong. It looked inhuman.
Su Yuan dragged himself up. He needed water. He needed sleep.
But as the adrenaline faded, the noise returned.
It started as a buzz at the base of his skull. A scratching sound, like a rat clawing behind drywall.
Su Yuan froze.
He closed his eyes, shutting out the physical world, and dropped into the Net.
The visualization had changed.
Before the Phantom Market harvest, the SoulNet had been a constellation of distinct, white lights. Clean. Orderly.
Now, it was a mess.
The 1,418 nodes swirled in a chaotic nebula. The majority were white—sleeping, dreaming, or idling. But scattered among them were blotches of dirty yellow and necrotic purple.
The scratching sound was coming from the purple ones.
**[ Alert: Data Corruption Detected. ]**
**[ Source: External Nodes (Batch: Phantom Market). ]**
**[ Integrity: Compromised. ]**
Su Yuan focused on a cluster of purple nodes. There were about fifty of them.
They weren't just idle. They were screaming.
It wasn't a scream of pain. It was a scream of static. Nonsense data. Loops of logic that folded in on themselves.
*What is this?*
He reached out with his mind, selecting a single node: **User ID: Junk_Rat_44.**
He dove in.
***
The smell hit him first.
In the digital connection, smell shouldn't exist. But the brain processes data through association, and this mind smelled of burning plastic and vomit.
Su Yuan stood in the construct of Junk_Rat_44's consciousness.
It was a hallway. A narrow, infinite hallway with flickering fluorescent lights that hummed at a frequency that made Su Yuan's teeth ache. The walls were dripping. Not water. They were dripping numbers, but the numbers were wrong. *2 + 2 = Fish. Up is Red.*
In the center of the hallway sat a man.
He was emaciated, his skin grey and pockmarked. He rocked back and forth, clutching a canister to his chest.
A Cyber-Stim inhaler.
The label was peeled, but Su Yuan recognized the brand. *Blue Velvet.* A cheap, illegal cognitive booster used by hackers to stay awake for days, or by laborers to ignore the pain of crushed limbs.
The man took a hit.
The hallway stretched. The walls breathed.
*"The spiders are in the code,"* the man muttered. *"The spiders are eating the zeros."*
Su Yuan watched, horrified.
The SoulNet was trying to harvest processing power from this brain. It sent a simple request: *Calculate trajectory for wind resistance.*
The man's brain took the request.
*Wind... wind is spiders. Spiders have eight legs. Trajectory is purple.*
The return packet was garbage.
**[ Error: Logic Failure. ]**
**[ Packet Discarded. ]**
Su Yuan pulled back, snapping his consciousness out of the addict's mind. He stood back in the clean white void of the Admin space.
He looked at the cluster of fifty purple nodes.
They were all like that. Addicts. Burnouts. People whose neural pathways had been chemically fried by cheap stims and dirty implants.
They weren't processors. They were viruses.
"System," Su Yuan said. "Quarantine the purple nodes. Cut them off."
**[ Analysis: Negative. ]**
The voice of the Genesis Protocol was heavier than usual. It sounded interested.
**[ Why? ]** Su Yuan asked. **[ They're useless. They're returning corrupted data. ]**
**[ Correction: They are returning Chaos Data. ]**
The Red Eye opened in the void above Su Yuan.
**[ Order is efficient. Chaos is creative. ]**
**[ The 'Spiders' logic is flawed for physics. It is excellent for encryption. ]**
**[ Do not discard the broken tools. They break things in unique ways. ]**
Su Yuan stared at the Eye. "You want to keep the junkies because they think in gibberish?"
**[ I want to keep them because they are unpredictable. ]**
**[ Recommendation: Segregate, do not delete. Build a 'Glitch Partition'. ]**
Su Yuan hesitated. The pragmatic part of him—the part that cleaned his rifle and checked his exits—wanted them gone. Corruption spread. If the madness of *Blue Velvet* leaked into his own combat algorithms, he might try to hug a sword instead of dodging it.
But the Protocol was the supercomputer. It saw patterns he didn't.
"Fine," Su Yuan conceded. "Partition them. But if I feel even a whisper of spider-logic in my main feed, I'm purging them. I don't care what the potential is."
**[ Agreed. Partitioning... ]**
The purple nodes were swept aside, corralled into a dark corner of the mental map, behind a heavy firewall. The scratching sound faded to a dull, distant murmur.
Su Yuan opened his eyes.
He was back on the training field. The silence was absolute again.
He checked his vitals.
**[ Mental Fatigue: 72%. ]**
**[ Hunger: Critical. ]**
He needed calories. High-density nutrient paste. And he needed to get off the grid before the sun came up.
He stood, dusting off his pants. He turned to leave.
And stopped.
At the edge of the field, fifty meters away, standing in the shadow of the equipment shed, was a figure.
Su Yuan's heart hammered a single, hard beat against his ribs.
He hadn't heard anyone approach. The *Flowing Mercury Steps* heightened his senses, and the SoulNet usually acted as a perimeter radar.
But this person was a void.
Su Yuan didn't move. He didn't take a combat stance. He just let his arms hang loose, ready to slide.
The figure stepped out of the shadow.
It was a girl.
She was short, wearing an oversized Academy hoodie that swallowed her frame. Her hair was a messy nest of black, pinned up with what looked like disassembled circuit boards. She wore thick, black-rimmed glasses that were completely opaque.
She held a tablet in one hand and a half-eaten syn-bar in the other.
She chewed slowly, looking at Su Yuan. Or rather, her glasses looked at him.
"You're loud," she said.
Her voice was flat. Monotone.
Su Yuan frowned. "I didn't make a sound."
"Not your feet," she said. She tapped the side of her own head. "Your noise. You hum. Like a broken fridge."
Su Yuan went cold.
*She can hear the Network?*
Impossible. The SoulNet wasn't radio. It wasn't Wi-Fi. It was soul-to-soul transmission. Unless she was a node...
He checked the map.
**[ Scan: Immediate Area. ]**
**[ Results: Zero Active Nodes. ]**
She wasn't on the Net.
"Who are you?" Su Yuan asked. His voice was low, dangerous.
The girl took another bite of her bar. "Wei. From Mechanics."
"What do you want, Wei?"
"I was sleeping in the shed," she said, pointing with the syn-bar. "The ventilation hums at 60 hertz. Good for sleeping. Then you showed up. You hum at..." She tilted her head. "Variable frequencies. It's annoying."
She walked closer. She didn't walk like a fighter. She walked like a sleepwalker, shuffling her feet.
She stopped five feet away. The opaque glasses reflected Su Yuan's exhausted face.
"You moved funny," she said. "On the gauntlet. Friction coefficient was zero. How did you do that?"
"Practice," Su Yuan said.
"Liar," she said instantly. No emotion. Just fact. "Physics doesn't care about practice. You changed the air pressure. Or you changed your skin texture."
She reached out a hand. Her fingers were stained with grease and solder.
"Let me see your arm."
"No."
She retracted her hand. "Okay."
She looked down at her tablet. Her fingers flew across the screen, faster than Su Yuan could follow.
"You're Su Yuan. First year. Scholarship. Mining accident. Medical records say you have a limp."
She looked up.
"You don't limp."
Su Yuan shifted his weight. The *Flowing Mercury* tension was coiled in his legs. If she reached for a comms unit, if she tried to alert security...
"I healed," Su Yuan said.
"Fast healer," Wei muttered. "Suspicious."
She tapped the screen one last time, then shoved the tablet into her hoodie pocket.
"I don't care," she announced. "But you woke me up. That costs."
"Costs?"
"You broke the silence," she said. "You owe me silence."
"I don't have silence," Su Yuan said, baffled.
"You have access," she said. "I saw you bypass the Sector 7 lockout. You have a backdoor key."
Su Yuan stiffened. He had used Node 14's cracking script to open the gate. He hadn't thought anyone was watching the logs.
"So?"
"I need into the Scrapyard," Wei said. "The Sector 9 disposal facility. The lock is military grade. My key is..." She gestured vaguely. "Expired."
"You want me to break into a military dump?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
Wei pushed her glasses up her nose. For a second, Su Yuan saw her eyes behind the lenses. They were red-rimmed, bloodshot, and frantic.
"They threw away a positronic brain yesterday," she whispered. "A Mark-II. It's broken. But I can fix it."
"And if I say no?"
"Then I tell Lin that the scholarship boy moves like liquid metal and hums like a server farm."
It wasn't a threat delivered with malice. It was a transaction. *Input: Blackmail. Output: Access.*
Su Yuan looked at her.
**[ Target Analysis: Wei. ]**
**[ Threat Level: Physical - Low. ]**
**[ Threat Level: Intellect - Extreme. ]**
**[ Note: Subject displays symptoms of obsessive neurodivergence focused on machinery. ]**
**[ Genesis Protocol: Opportunity. ]**
**[ A mechanic is required. The hardware needs upgrading. ]**
Su Yuan relaxed his stance.
"Tonight?" he asked.
"Now," Wei said. "Before the incinerators turn on at 0500."
Su Yuan looked at the eastern horizon. The smog was lightening to a bruised purple.
He was exhausted. His brain felt like it was packed with steel wool. He had just fought a Glitch in the machine and tested a skill that defied physics.
But a positronic brain... that was high-level hardware. If she could fix it, maybe she could fix other things. Maybe she could build the interface he needed to stop bleeding from his ears every time he used the Net.
"Fine," Su Yuan said. "Lead the way."
Wei nodded. She turned around and started shuffling toward the maintenance tunnels.
"Stop humming," she said over her shoulder.
"I can't control it," Su Yuan replied, falling in step behind her.
"Learn," she said. "It's cluttering the signal."
Su Yuan looked at her back.
*Cluttering the signal.*
He had the sickening realization that she wasn't talking about sound. She was talking about the SoulNet. She couldn't see it, but she could *feel* the electromagnetic displacement of 1,400 souls being processed in close proximity.
She was a natural receiver.
**[ Mark her, ]** the Genesis Protocol whispered. **[ She is not a node. She is an antenna. ]**
Su Yuan pulled his jacket tighter against the cold.
"Just get us to the Scrapyard, Wei," he muttered.
They disappeared into the darkness of the service tunnel, a boy carrying a digital legion and a girl hunting for dead brains.
The morning birds—mechanical drones programmed to sing at dawn—began to chirp. The sound was perfectly rhythmic, perfectly pitched, and utterly soulless.
Su Yuan preferred the scratching of the Glitch nodes. At least the madness was human.