Chapter 19: The Core Chamber
The elevator descent into Sub-level 4 didn't feel like moving down. It felt like standing still while the world was pulled upward, away from him.
Su Yuan watched the floor indicator. The red LEDs were the only light in the box. *B1... B2... B3...*
The air grew heavier. It wasn't humidity; it was the pressure of containment fields bleeding through the shaft walls. His ears popped. The implant behind his mastoid bone warmed up, reacting to the ambient radiation.
**[ Proximity Alert: High-Grade Energy Source. ]**
**[ Genesis Protocol Status: Salivating. ]**
Su Yuan ignored the text scrolling across his retina. He checked the bandage on his neck, the one covering the fresh injection site where the infirmary drones had knit his clavicle back together. It still itched.
He held Lin's black keycard in a hand that refused to shake. Fear was a chemical reaction. The Logic-Core monitored his adrenals and clamped down on the valve. He was biologically incapable of trembling, even if his mind was screaming that this was a bad idea.
*Ding.*
The doors slid open.
Sub-level 4 wasn't a hallway. It was a throat. The walls were lined with thick, insulated cabling that pulsed with a low, rhythmic thrum—the heartbeat of the Academy. The floor was grated steel, revealing darkness and the hiss of steam pipes below.
Two automata stood guard at the far end of the catwalk. These weren't the sleek, plastic-shelled units from the upper levels. These were industrial enforcement droids—bulk loaders retrofitted with heavy repeater cannons. They didn't have faces, just sensor clusters that glowed a dull, hostile amber.
Su Yuan stepped out.
The droids swiveled. The servos whined.
"Halt," the left one broadcasted. The voice was flat, synthesized gravel. "Restricted Zone. Biometric scan initiated."
A laser grid swept over Su Yuan's face.
**[ Identity: Cadet Su Yuan. ]**
**[ Clearance: Student (Revoked). ]**
"Authorization failed," the droid stated. The repeater cannon on its arm spun up with a sound like tearing canvas. "Sanction: Lethal force authorized in 3... 2..."
Su Yuan didn't break stride. He held up the black card.
The laser hit the gold stripe.
The cannon stopped spinning. The amber eye blinked once, then cycled to green.
"Override accepted. Administrative Access: Maintenance/Emergency. Welcome, Technician."
The droids stepped aside, heavy metal feet clanking on the grate. They returned to their statue-like vigil.
Su Yuan walked past them. He could smell the oil on their joints. He could feel the heat radiating from their fusion cores. They were A-Rank threats. If Lin's card had been a microsecond out of sync, he would be a wet smear on the wall.
He reached the blast door at the end of the catwalk. It was a circular valve, three meters of tungsten and lead.
He swiped the card.
Hydraulics hissed—a long, agonizing exhalation of pressurized air. The gears turned, grinding deep in the walls. The door rolled back.
Su Yuan stepped into the Core Chamber.
***
The room was vast, circular, and utterly silent. The walls were lined with sound-dampening foam, absorbing the hum of the machinery.
In the center of the room, suspended inside a containment field of shimmering hexa-glass, was the Source.
It wasn't a crystal. That was a metaphor the students used.
It was a tear.
A jagged, unstable rupture in space-time, roughly the size of a human torso, glowing with a violet light so intense it hurt to look at. Cables—thick as tree trunks—were jammed directly into the event horizon of the tear, siphoning off the energy that bled from the other side.
This was what powered the city. This was what kept the lights on in the slums and the shields up in the Spire. A wound in reality that refused to heal.
**[ TARGET ACQUIRED. ]**
The voice of the Genesis Protocol hit Su Yuan like a physical blow. It wasn't text this time. It was a roar in the back of his skull.
**[ CONSUME. ]**
Su Yuan staggered, grabbing the railing of the observation platform. The hunger wasn't his, but his stomach cramped violently, his mouth filling with saliva. The implant burned hot enough to blister skin.
"Wait," Su Yuan gasped. "We do this my way."
**[ INEFFICIENT. BREAK THE GLASS. EAT THE MEAT. ]**
"If I break the glass, the containment fails and we vaporize," Su Yuan hissed. He wiped sweat from his eyes. "We use the interface."
He moved to the control console. It was a bank of analog switches and dials, old-tech that couldn't be hacked remotely.
He plugged a cable from his wrist comms into the port.
"Wei," he muttered. "You there?"
Static. Then, a voice, clear but tense. *"I'm here. I'm in the HVAC sublevel. The thermal charge is set on the cooling exchange."*
"How long?"
*"Sixty seconds. When this thing blows, the sensors in the Core are going to scream 'overheat'. The automated system will try to vent the excess energy."*
"That's when I open the valve," Su Yuan said.
*"Su Yuan,"* Wei paused. The bravado slipped for a second. *"If you drain too much... the city goes dark. And the Council will know it wasn't a malfunction."*
"I'll leave them enough to keep the lights on," Su Yuan lied.
"Do it."
*"Fire in the hole."*
The line went dead.
Su Yuan stood before the console. He closed his eyes.
He didn't reach for the energy yet. He reached for the people.
*SoulNet: Activate.*
The visualization unfolded in his mind. The dark ocean. The floating lights.
It was night in the city. Most of the 2,145 nodes were asleep. Their lights were dim, pulsing slowly.
*Wake up,* Su Yuan thought.
He didn't send an alert. He didn't send a quest. He sent a sensation. A sudden, sharp intake of breath. A feeling of falling.
Across Sector 12, two thousand people twitched in their sleep. Their REM cycles synced up.
**[ Network Status: Primed. ]**
**[ Topology: Vortex Formation. ]**
Su Yuan manipulated the connections. Usually, the SoulNet was a web—flat, interconnected. Now, he twisted it. He grabbed the edges of the network and pulled them inward, spiraling the connections around his own central node.
He was the eye of the storm. They were the wind.
*Whump.*
A dull vibration shook the floor. Wei's charge.
On the console, lights turned from green to red.
**[ ALERT: COOLANT PRESSURE LOSS. ]**
**[ AUTOMATED VENTING SEQUENCE INITIATED. ]**
The blast door on the containment unit hissed open just an inch. It was meant to vent excess heat into the atmosphere.
Instead, a beam of violet plasma shot out, uncontrolled.
Su Yuan stepped into the beam.
He didn't burn.
**[ ABSORPTION MODE: MAXIMUM. ]**
He opened the floodgates.
The energy didn't hit his body; it hit the network.
Su Yuan acted as the intake manifold. The raw, destructive power of the Source slammed into him, but before it could tear his cells apart, the Logic-Core shunted it.
It split the river.
One percent of the energy stayed in Su Yuan. Ninety-nine percent was blasted out through the SoulNet, filtered through two thousand human souls.
In the slums, a sleeping laborer gasped, his chest heaving as a surge of vitality washed through his exhausted muscles. He would wake up tomorrow feeling ten years younger.
In the dorms, a student's eyes flew open, his mind suddenly calculating complex equations in the dark.
They acted as the radiator. They took the heat. They took the load.
And in return, they sent the refined, processed essence back to Su Yuan.
It came back clean. Cold. Dense.
Su Yuan screamed.
It felt like someone was pouring molten lead into his marrow.
His bones were breaking. All of them. The sheer density of the energy was too much for human calcium to withstand. The femur snapped. The ribs cracked like dry twigs.
**[ STRUCTURAL FAILURE DETECTED. ]**
**[ INITIATING RECONSTRUCTION. ]**
**[ MATERIAL: IRON BODY CULTIVATION (STAGE 1). ]**
The Genesis Protocol took over the repairs. It didn't just knit the bones; it evolved them. It pulled carbon and trace metals from his blood stream, fusing them into the lattice of his skeleton.
*Snap. Crunch. Pop.*
Su Yuan fell to his knees, clawing at the metal grate. His fingernails tore loose. New ones grew back instantly, dark and hard as obsidian.
The pain was beyond the ability of the Logic-Core to suppress. It was absolute. It was the universe folding itself into a biological container that was too small.
"More," Su Yuan choked out. Blood sprayed from his lips, sizzling on the floor. "Take... more."
He widened the vortex.
The room began to shake. The containment glass rattled. The violet light was being sucked out of the tear, bending physically toward Su Yuan's chest. He was a black hole.
**[ ENERGY RESERVES: 200%... 400%... ]**
**[ TIERS BREACHED: F-RANK... E-RANK... ]**
His skin turned grey. Not the pallor of sickness, but the dull sheen of galvanized steel. His muscles swelled, tearing the hospital gown, fibers knitting together with the tensile strength of suspension cables.
Inside his mind, the Genesis Protocol was laughing. A sound like grinding gears.
**[ YES. BUILD THE VESSEL. PREPARE THE HOST. ]**
*Host?*
The word cut through the pain.
Su Yuan gritted his teeth. *I am not a host. I am the driver.*
He slammed a mental wall down on the intake valve.
"Stop!"
**[ NEGATIVE. WE ARE NOT FULL. ]**
"I said stop!"
Su Yuan forced his hand to move. His arm felt like it weighed a ton. He reached for the console.
The alarms were screaming now. Real alarms. The facility had realized that the venting wasn't fixing the pressure—it was draining the core.
**[ WARNING: SECURITY BREACH. SQUADRON ALPHA EN ROUTE. ]**
He had seconds.
He grabbed the manual override lever. His new, steel-hard fingers left deep indentations in the metal handle.
He pulled.
The containment vent slammed shut.
The flow of energy severed.
Su Yuan collapsed. The sudden absence of power was worse than the intake. It left him cold, hollow, shivering on the grate.
Smoke rose from his skin. His clothes were in tatters.
He lay there, gasping, listening to the pounding of his own heart. It sounded different. Slower. Heavier. Like a hydraulic pump.
*Thud-thud. Thud-thud.*
He looked at his hand. The grey sheen faded, sinking beneath the epidermis, but the structure remained. He made a fist. The air inside his palm compressed with a sharp *pop*.
Iron Body. E-Rank physique. He had skipped three years of cultivation in three minutes.
*Clang.*
The main blast door behind him shook. Sparks flew as a plasma cutter began to carve through the lock.
"Open the door! This is Sector Security!"
Su Yuan forced himself up. His body felt strange—too solid, too grounded. He had to calibrate his movements or he'd crush the console.
"System," he wheezed. "Hide the readings. Mask the cultivation level."
**[ MASKING ACTIVE. EMULATING: F-RANK (INJURED). ]**
**[ ENERGY SIGNATURE: DISSIPATED. ]**
"What about the missing energy?"
**[ RE-ROUTING LOGS. BLAME THE VENTILATION MALFUNCTION. DATA CORRUPTION INSERTED. ]**
Su Yuan wiped the blood from his mouth. He smoothed his torn gown. He slumped against the console, trying to look like a terrified student who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The blast door blew inward.
Smoke filled the room. Through the haze, six armored figures stormed in, rifles raised.
"Hands! Let me see hands!"
Su Yuan raised his hands slowly. They trembled—fake trembling, perfectly calculated.
A captain in blue armor marched forward, scanning the room. He looked at the console, then at the sealed vent, then at Su Yuan.
"Identify," the Captain barked.
"Cadet Su Yuan," he whispered, injecting a rasp into his voice. "I... I was sent for maintenance. The cooling system... it exploded."
The Captain looked at the readings on his visor.
"Core integrity is stable," a subordinate called out. "Levels are low, sir. We lost about 15% capacity."
"The vent must have stuck open," the Captain muttered. He grabbed Su Yuan by the shoulder. His gauntlet squeezed.
Any normal student would have cried out. Su Yuan had to remind himself to wince. Under the armor, his shoulder felt like a granite boulder. The Captain was squeezing rock.
"You're lucky you're not ash, kid," the Captain said, shoving him toward the medics rushing in. "Get him out of here. Decon and interrogation."
Su Yuan let himself be manhandled onto a stretcher.
As they wheeled him out, he looked back at the Source.
The violet tear was dimmer. It looked tired.
But deep in his mind, the SoulNet was blazing. 2,000 nodes were charged, vibrant, stronger than they had ever been. He hadn't just upgraded himself. He had upgraded the fleet.
And the Genesis Protocol?
It was quiet. Sated. For now.
But Su Yuan remembered the word. *Host.*
He closed his eyes as the medics strapped him down.
He wasn't just fighting the Council anymore. He was fighting his own biology.
***
**Infirmary Holding Cell. Two hours later.**
The interrogation had been brief. The logs backed up his story: catastrophic failure of the cooling exchange, automated venting, accidental survivor. Wei had done her job well.
Su Yuan sat on the edge of the cot. He was wearing fresh grey fatigues.
He held a metal spoon from his dinner tray.
He focused on his thumb and forefinger. He didn't use Qi. He didn't use the System. He just squeezed.
The spoon didn't bend. It flattened. The neck of the utensil turned into a thin wafer of steel, then snapped.
He looked at the pieces.
Iron Body was a defensive stage. It meant he could take a bullet from a low-caliber kinetic weapon and bruise. It meant he could punch a concrete wall and the wall would lose.
But it also meant he was heavy. Dense.
He stood up and moved through the forms of the *Primary Shockwave*.
It was sluggish. His muscles were adapting, but his nervous system was lagging. He was driving a tank with the steering wheel of a sedan.
*I need speed,* he analyzed. *I traded velocity for mass.*
The door slid open.
Instructor Lin didn't walk in. She leaned against the frame, arms crossed. She looked pale.
"You blew up my cooling system," she said.
"It was faulty," Su Yuan said, dropping the broken spoon into his pocket.
"The Council is furious," Lin said. "The brownouts hit the manufacturing district. Production is down 12%."
"A tragedy," Su Yuan said.
Lin stepped inside. The door hissed shut behind her. She tapped her jamming device.
"Drop the act, Su Yuan."
She walked up to him. She reached out and poked his chest. It was a hard, stiff jab.
She frowned. She poked him again, harder.
Then she grabbed his wrist. Her eyes widened.
"Your skin," she whispered. "It feels like... packed sand."
She looked up at his eyes.
"Iron Body? In one night?"
"I absorb efficiently," Su Yuan said.
Lin let go of his hand as if it burned her. She backed away, pacing the small room.
"Do you have any idea what you've done? Iron Body takes five years of brine-soaking and bone-breaking. You did it in a microwave."
"We don't have five years, Instructor. You said it yourself. The Spire is watching."
Lin stopped pacing. She looked at him with a mix of fear and something that looked like awe.
"They aren't just watching anymore," she said quietly. "They're moving."
She pulled a datapad from her belt and held it up.
"General Order 66," she read. "All students ranked in the Top 50 are to be conscripted immediately for a 'Special Field Exercise' in the Wastelands."
Su Yuan went still.
"The Wastelands?"
"Outside the city walls," Lin said. "Where the smog is toxic and the beasts are... unregulated."
"Why?"
"To cull the herd," Lin said grimly. "They know someone tapped the Source. They know someone is manipulating the grid. But they don't know who. So they're going to throw the top fifty prospects into a meat grinder and see who survives."
She lowered the pad.
"If you die out there, Su Yuan, you're just another failed cadet. If you survive... well, then they'll know."
Su Yuan felt the Genesis Protocol stir. It wasn't hungry anymore. It was interested.
*The Wastelands,* the voice whispered. *Biomass. Ancient Tech. Opportunity.*
Su Yuan looked at Lin.
"When do we leave?"
"Dawn," Lin said. "Pack light. And Su Yuan?"
"Yes?"
"That spoon in your pocket?" Lin gestured to the bulge in his trousers. "Hide the pieces better. If they find out you can crush steel with your fingers, they won't send you to the Wastelands. They'll strap you to a vivisection table tonight."
She turned to leave.
"Get some sleep. You're going to need it."
The door closed.
Su Yuan took out the broken spoon. He stared at his reflection in the twisted metal. His eyes looked darker. Harder.
He checked the SoulNet.
**[ Active Nodes: 2,145. ]**
**[ Status: Charged. Awaiting Input. ]**
**[ New Quest Available: The Long March. ]**
He needed more than just students and laborers now. If he was going into the Wastelands, he needed soldiers. He needed killers.
He expanded the search parameters.
*The Wastelands are dangerous,* Su Yuan thought. *But they're also uncontrolled.*
No cameras. No sensors.
"Genesis," he whispered.
**[ ONLINE. ]**
"Prepare a new training algorithm. We're not practicing boxing anymore."
**[ SPECIFY. ]**
Su Yuan crushed the spoon fragments into a ball of scrap metal.
"Survival," he said. "We're going hunting."