Chapter 20: The Architect's Manifesto
Su Yuan sat on the floor of his dorm room. It was dark, save for the amber glow of the streetlights filtering through the blinds, painting stripes across his legs.
He held a standard-issue ceramic mug in his hand.
He squeezed.
There was no strain, no trembling of tendons. The ceramic simply surrendered. It turned to powder and jagged shards, grinding against his palm with the sound of chewing gravel.
He opened his hand. Dust drifted onto the linoleum.
*Too strong,* the Logic-Core noted. *Motor control calibration: 74%.*
His body felt dense. The Iron Body upgrade hadn't just hardened his skin; it had packed his molecular structure until he felt like he was piloting a suit of lead armor. Every movement required conscious effort to keep from tearing the cheap furniture apart. He was durable, yes. He was also slow.
And tomorrow, they were shipping him to the Wastelands.
The Wastelands didn't care about durability. A Razor-Back Wolf could chew through tank plating. If you couldn't move, you were just canned food.
He needed speed. But speed required agility, and his current physiology was fighting against physics.
Su Yuan stood up. The floorboards groaned.
He needed data. He needed the proprioceptive input of a thousand people moving like water, so his Logic-Core could map that fluidity onto his own iron bones.
He touched the implant behind his ear. It was cool now, the hunger of the Genesis Protocol settled into a low, predatory hum.
"System," he subvocalized. "Access the Phantom Market."
**[ WARNING: UNSECURED NETWORK. TRACE PROBABILITY: HIGH. ]**
"Route through the nodes," Su Yuan ordered. "Bounce the signal through the slum relays. Use the sleeping users as proxies."
**[ ROUTING... CONNECTION ESTABLISHED. ]**
The darkness of the room didn't change, but in his mind, the world inverted. The SoulNet overlay flared to life.
The Phantom Market wasn't a place. It was a digital ulcer on the city's network. It was where the desperate bought illegal stims, unlicensed cybernetics, and forbidden cultivation manuals. It was a chaotic mess of neon code and jagged data streams, smelling faintly of ozone and old blood even through the neural link.
Su Yuan didn't browse. He wasn't here to buy.
He navigated to the *skill exchange*—a graveyard of scams and half-baked techniques rejected by the Academy.
He opened a new vendor profile.
**[ USER ID: THE ARCHITECT ]**
He began to type.
He didn't write a sales pitch. He wrote a declaration of war.
*To the F-Ranks,* he wrote. *To the narrow-veined. To the waste products of the Academy.*
*They told you biology is destiny. They told you that without noble blood or expensive implants, you are meat for the machine. They measured your meridians and stamped 'Reject' on your forehead.*
*They lied.*
*Talent is a variable. Data is a constant.*
*I am The Architect. I do not care about your bloodline. I care about your output.*
Su Yuan paused. The Genesis Protocol swirled in the back of his mind, adding its own cold flavor to the words.
*I am releasing the source code for human potential.*
He attached the file.
**[ SKILL: FLOWING MERCURY STEPS ]**
**[ RANK: UNRATED (THEORETICAL E-RANK) ]**
**[ PRICE: 0 CREDITS. ]**
**[ COST: SYSTEM LINKAGE (USER AGREEMENT REQUIRED). ]**
The *Flowing Mercury Steps* wasn't a high-end technique. It was a modified version of the Academy's basic footwork, stripped of the rigid, formal stances and optimized for pure, chaotic fluidity. He had refined it using the data from the "Catching Flies" quest, analyzing the erratic flight paths of insects.
It was designed for people who needed to run away. Fast.
"Upload," Su Yuan said.
**[ UPLOADING... ]**
**[ FILE LIVE. ]**
He sat back against the cold wall. Now, he waited.
The Phantom Market was usually slow. Trust was scarce. Nobody downloaded free skills; free usually meant a virus that fried your cortex or a tracker that led the Enforcers to your door.
One minute passed.
**[ DOWNLOADS: 1 ]**
Somewhere in the industrial district, a kid with insomnia and a stolen datapad took a risk.
Su Yuan closed his eyes. He felt the connection snap into place. A new node on the SoulNet.
*User: Rat_Boy_09.*
Su Yuan watched through the connection. He didn't see the room; he saw the data. The kid was trying the steps. Stumbling. cursing. Trying again.
The kid's center of gravity shifted. His foot placement adjusted.
*Data received.*
**[ DOWNLOADS: 14 ]**
**[ DOWNLOADS: 105 ]**
It was spreading. Not through advertising, but through the desperate grapevine of the underclass. A free skill? A skill that actually *worked*?
The notifications began to blur.
**[ Active Nodes: 2,400... 2,800... 3,100. ]**
Su Yuan felt the influx of soul power. It wasn't the violent rush of the Core Chamber. It was a steady, rising tide. Each user practicing the steps generated a microscopic amount of focus, of mental energy. The SoulNet harvested it, bundled it, and fed it to the server.
Fed it to Su Yuan.
The Genesis Protocol woke up fully. It purred.
**[ COMPUTATIONAL CAPACITY INCREASED. ]**
**[ CURRENT LOAD: 18% OF SECTOR CAPACITY. ]**
Su Yuan focused on his own body. He stood up again.
*Download the aggregate reflex data,* he ordered.
The System pulled the movement patterns from three thousand people. It filtered out the mistakes, the stumbles, the falls. It kept only the successes. The moments of perfect balance.
Su Yuan stepped forward.
He didn't stomp. He glided.
His heavy, iron-dense body moved with a jarring grace. He pivoted on his heel, the movement silent. He was a tank moving like a dancer.
"Better," he whispered.
But defense and speed weren't enough. The Wastelands required lethality. He needed to hit back, and he needed to hit harder than a physical punch.
He looked at his accumulation of Soul Points—the currency of the Protocol. The number was ticking up like a stopwatch.
"Genesis," Su Yuan said. "Begin deduction. D-Rank Offensive Skill."
**[ PARAMETERS? ]**
"Something that bypasses armor," Su Yuan said, thinking of the thick hides of the beasts and the exoskeletons of the rich. "Something that uses the *Shockwave* principle but focused. Vibration at a cellular level."
**[ ANALYZING... ]**
**[ ESTIMATED COST: 5,000 SOUL UNITS. ]**
**[ TIME TO COMPLETION: 4 HOURS. ]**
"Start it."
Su Yuan sat back down on the bed. The metal frame creaked in protest.
He checked the Phantom Market forum attached to his upload. The comments were starting to roll in.
*User Scrapper_Lk:* "Is this real? My meridian flow just spiked by 10%."
*User NoName:* "Who is The Architect? This code... it's clean. Too clean."
*User Void_Walker:* "The User Agreement is weird. It asks for 'Neural Synchronization'. Is this a cult?"
Su Yuan smiled in the dark. It wasn't a nice smile.
"Yes," he whispered to the empty room. "But you're already in the pews."
He closed the interface. He had four hours until the deduction finished. Six hours until dawn.
He laid back, staring at the cracked ceiling.
He wasn't just a cadet anymore. He was a weapon platform. And the rest of the city was just the battery pack.
***
**The Spire. Level 99. The Boardroom.**
The air up here was recycled, scrubbed of all pollutants, and chilled to a precise nineteen degrees Celsius. It smelled of nothing. No sweat, no ozone, no life.
The table was a slab of black obsidian, long enough to seat twenty, but currently occupied by only three.
Director Kael sat at the head. He didn't look like a man who ran the Department of Internal Security. He looked like an accountant who had been dried out in the sun. His skin was papery, his suit grey, his eyes devoid of pigment.
To his right sat the Analyst, a woman with cybernetic implants replacing both eyes, glowing softly with blue data streams.
To his left was the General of the City Guard, a massive man whose military dress uniform strained to contain a neck thick with grafted muscle.
"Explain," Director Kael said. He didn't raise his voice. He didn't have to.
The Analyst tapped the obsidian table. A hologram materialized in the center of the room.
It was a map of the city. Specifically, the lower sectors—the slums, the factories, the worker dorms.
Usually, these sectors were dim, representing low data traffic and low threat.
Tonight, they were pulsing.
Thousands of tiny red lights flickered in the darkness of the map.
"We detected a massive spike in unauthorized neural coupling," the Analyst said. Her voice was synthesized, harmonic and cold. "Starting at 0200 hours. Origin point masked, but the spread is viral."
"A riot?" the General grunted, leaning forward. "Give me the order. I'll flush the sectors with gas."
"Not a riot," the Analyst corrected. "Synchronization."
She zoomed in. The red lights were connected by thin, gossamer lines of data, forming a web that spanned half the city.
"Someone released a cognitive packet on the Phantom Market," she explained. "A movement technique. But embedded in the code is a secondary protocol. A leech."
"A leech?" Kael asked.
"It harvests neural excess," the Analyst said. "Focus. Intent. Small amounts, negligible to the individual. But in aggregate..."
"A distributed supercomputer," Kael finished. He looked at the map. "Who is the beneficiary?"
"The alias is 'The Architect'," the Analyst said. "Tracing failed. The signal bounces through the users themselves. To find the source, we'd have to decrypt three thousand brains simultaneously."
The General slammed his fist on the table. "This is an insurgency. They're building a network right under our noses."
Director Kael stood up. He walked to the floor-to-ceiling window. Below him, the city was a carpet of smog and light. Somewhere down there, in the filth, someone was playing god.
"We had an incident at the Academy yesterday," Kael said softly. "A cadet survived a Core breach. An anomaly."
"Su Yuan," the General spat. "The F-Rank lucky charm. My boys are shipping him to the Wastelands at dawn. He won't survive the first night."
"Perhaps," Kael said. He touched the glass. "Or perhaps we are underestimating the variable."
He turned back to the room.
"The Architect creates a problem. An organized lower class is a threat to the stability of the Spire. We cannot allow them to realize they have power."
"Do I deploy the jammers?" the Analyst asked.
"Inefficient," Kael said. "Jammers stop the signal. I want to stop the hope."
He looked at the General.
"Update the parameters for the Wasteland Field Exercise."
The General frowned. "Sir?"
"It is no longer a survival exercise," Kael said. "Authorize the deployment of the *Digital Purge* unit."
The General's eyes widened slightly. "Hunter-Killers? For a bunch of students?"
"If Su Yuan is The Architect," Kael said, his voice dry as dust, "he will use those students as resources. He will try to turn the exercise into a recruitment drive."
Kael sat back down and folded his hands.
"Send the HKs. Their orders are simple: terminate any student who displays anomalous combat data. If they improve too fast... kill them."
"And Su Yuan?" the General asked.
Kael smiled. It was a facial expression he hadn't used in years, and it looked painful.
"Bring me his head. I want to see what the brain of an Architect looks like when it's dissected."
***
**Sector 4. 0400 Hours.**
The deduction was taking a toll.
Su Yuan lay on his bunk, sweat soaking through his grey shirt. His head pounded with a rhythmic thumping, like a hammer wrapped in cloth striking his frontal lobe.
Borrowing processing power wasn't free. The SoulNet distributed the load, but he was the bottleneck. The Genesis Protocol was churning through the data of three thousand minds, trying to solve the physics of cellular destruction.
*98%... 99%...*
A sudden, sharp spike of pain drove a gasp from his lungs. It felt like a hot needle piercing his temple.
**[ DEDUCTION COMPLETE. ]**
**[ NEW SKILL CREATED. ]**
**[ NAME: RESONANCE PALM (D-RANK). ]**
**[ ATTRIBUTE: INTERNAL DESTRUCTION. ]**
Su Yuan sat up, breathing hard. He wiped the blood from his nose.
The knowledge was there. It hadn't been learned; it had been stamped directly onto his memory centers. He knew exactly how to vibrate his Qi—his energy—to match the resonant frequency of bone, metal, or stone.
It wasn't a push. It was a destabilization.
He looked at his hand. The iron-grey skin looked dull in the low light.
He needed to test it.
He picked up a heavy steel bolt he had scavenged from the maintenance closet—thick as a thumb, rusted, solid.
He held it in his left hand. He placed his right palm against the head of the bolt.
He didn't squeeze. He didn't use strength.
He focused.
*Resonate.*
A low hum emitted from his hand. It wasn't audible so much as felt—a tooth-rattling vibration that traveled up his arm.
The steel bolt didn't bend.
It *screamed*. A high-pitched whine of metal under stress.
Then, it dusted.
The molecular bonds holding the steel together simply let go. The bolt disintegrated into a pile of fine, metallic sand in his palm.
Su Yuan stared at the grey dust.
An F-Rank skill pushed air. A D-Rank skill manipulated physics.
"Nasty," he muttered.
A sharp rap on the door broke his concentration.
"Cadet Su Yuan! Transport leaves in ten minutes! Gear up!"
The shouting of the proctor echoed down the hallway. Doors were slamming. Boots were stomping. The smell of fear was already wafting through the ventilation.
Su Yuan brushed the steel dust off his hand. He grabbed his meager pack—a water ration, a combat knife, and a thermal blanket.
He checked the SoulNet one last time.
**[ Active Nodes: 3,450. ]**
**[ Trend: Rising. ]**
The manifesto was working. The F-ranks were waking up. They were practicing his steps, feeding him power, unknowingly preparing him for the slaughter.
He walked to the door.
He felt the gaze of the Spire on him. He felt the weight of the city.
But for the first time since he had arrived in this hellscape, he didn't feel small.
He opened the door and stepped into the harsh fluorescent light of the corridor.
Other students were filing out—faces pale, some crying, some trying to look brave. They were cattle heading to the slaughterhouse.
Su Yuan fell in line. He kept his head down, shoulders hunched, playing the part of the cripple.
But as he passed a reflective panel on the wall, he caught his own eye.
The Genesis Protocol flickered behind his iris. A blue, digital ghost.
*Let them send the beasts,* Su Yuan thought, the corner of his mouth twitching upward. *Let them send the purges.*
*I'm bringing the whole damn network with me.*
He marched toward the transport bay, his footsteps silent, fluid, and heavy as a falling anvil.