Chapter 21: Digital Purge
The troop transport smelled of stale vomit and industrial disinfectant. It was a heavy, six-wheeled coffin rumbling over the cracked asphalt of the outer highway, having left the paved serenity of the inner sectors hours ago.
Su Yuan sat near the rear hatch. The metal bench vibrated against his spine, a constant, tooth-rattling frequency that would have bruised him yesterday. Today, with bones like cast iron, it just felt like a distant suggestion of movement.
Across from him, a girl with chopped pink hair was weeping silently. She couldn't have been more than seventeen. Her knuckles were white where she gripped the safety bar.
Su Yuan didn't offer comfort. He closed his eyes, feigning sleep, and sank into the noise.
It wasn't the noise of the engine. It was the hum of three thousand, four hundred and fifty minds.
The SoulNet was a heavy coat. Since the release of the manifesto and the *Flowing Mercury Steps*, the connection hadn't just grown; it had thickened. It was no longer a thread. It was a rope. He could feel the pulse of the city fading behind him—the waking dreams of shift workers, the jagged focus of street kids practicing his footwork in alleyways, the dull ache of the hungover and the hopeless.
They were feeding him. Every stumbled step, every flash of concentration, trickled up the pyramid.
**[ System Status: Idle. ]**
**[ Background Processing: 12%. ]**
**[ Genesis Protocol: Observing. ]**
*Quiet,* Su Yuan thought. *Too quiet.*
The Spire didn't let people steal fire from the gods without burning their fingers. He had released a virus of hope into the slums. The immune system of the city was bound to react.
The migraine hit him before the alert did.
It wasn't a headache. It was a railroad spike driven through the base of his skull, exiting through his left eye.
Su Yuan gasped, his head snapping back against the hull. The girl with pink hair flinched, staring at him.
"You okay?" she whispered, her voice trembling.
Su Yuan didn't answer. He couldn't. His vision washed out in a bath of static white.
The hum of the SoulNet changed. It wasn't a hum anymore. It was a scream.
**[ WARNING. WARNING. ]**
**[ MASS INTRUSION DETECTED. ]**
**[ SIGNATURE: MILITARY-GRADE. TYPE: NEURAL PHAGE. ]**
It wasn't a localized hack. It was a carpet bomb.
In the digital overlay of his mind, Su Yuan saw the map of the city. The slum sectors—Sector 12, 11, the Industrial Zone—were lighting up red.
The virus was called *Digital Purge*. He recognized the signature from old archives. It was a scorched-earth protocol used during the Corporate Wars. It didn't just sever connections; it traced the neural link back to the host brain and overloaded the synapses with a voltage spike. It cooked the meat to save the server.
Three thousand nodes. Three thousand people.
He felt *Rat_Boy_09* first. The kid was in a basement in Sector 11. Su Yuan felt the boy's sudden, blinding confusion, then a spike of agony as his cheap, black-market neural interface began to heat up.
Then *Scrapper_Lk*. Then *Void_Walker*.
The screams were silent in the physical world, but in the SoulNet, they were a deafening choir of agony.
**[ THREAT ASSESSMENT: CRITICAL. ]**
**[ GENESIS PROTOCOL ADVISORY: SEVER CONNECTION. ]**
The voice of the machine was cold, cutting through the pain.
**[ AMPUTATE THE NETWORK. SAVE THE CORE. IF YOU MAINTAIN THE LINK, THE FEEDBACK LOOP WILL LIQUEFY YOUR FRONTAL LOBE. ]**
Su Yuan gripped the safety bar. The metal groaned under his iron fingers, warping.
"No," he hissed through gritted teeth.
**[ ILLOGICAL. THE ASSETS ARE EXPENDABLE. ]**
"They aren't assets," Su Yuan snarled internally. "They're the engine."
If he cut them loose, they died. Thousands of lobotomized husks drooling in the gutters. And Su Yuan would be back to zero, a lone spark in the dark, waiting for the Spire to snuff him out.
He had promised them power. He couldn't deliver a stroke.
The pain blinded him. Blood began to trickle from his nose, hot and thick.
"What are you doing?" the pink-haired girl asked, her voice rising in panic. She saw the blood. She saw the way Su Yuan's veins were bulging, turning black against his grey skin.
Su Yuan ignored her. He dove into the fire.
*SoulNet: Override.*
He didn't block the virus. You can't block a tidal wave with a bucket.
He opened the gates.
*Pull it in,* he ordered.
**[ WARNING: CAPACITY EXCEEDED. ]**
**[ YOU ARE ATTEMPTING TO BUFFER A TERABYTE OF MALWARE IN A HUMAN BRAIN. ]**
"Not just my brain," Su Yuan thought. "Use the network. Distributed processing."
He grabbed the screaming chaos of the three thousand nodes. He forced his will upon them. It was a violent act. He didn't ask for permission; he seized control of their fear.
*Stop screaming,* he projected into the void. *Think.*
He took the *Digital Purge* code—a jagged, hateful algorithm made of pure destructive math—and he fragmented it.
He sent a chunk of the virus to *Rat_Boy_09*. *Process this line of code.*
He sent a chunk to the sleeping shift workers. *Calculate this variable.*
He turned the victimized network into a massive, distributed quarantine zone.
In the real world, Su Yuan's body went rigid. He stopped breathing.
Inside, he was standing in a hurricane.
The virus fought back. It was sentient in the way fire is sentient—it wanted to consume. It lashed out at his defenses, trying to burn through the logic gates he was erecting.
*It's too fast,* Su Yuan realized. *It's rewriting itself every millisecond.*
He needed more power.
He looked at the Genesis Protocol. The blue ghost hovering in the periphery of his mind, watching with detached curiosity.
"Help me," Su Yuan ordered.
**[ WHY? ]**
"Because if I die, you go back to being a calculator in a jar."
The Protocol paused. It evaluated.
**[ ACCEPTABLE PARAMETER. ]**
**[ INITIATING: LOGIC-CORE OVERCLOCK. ]**
The heat in Su Yuan's skull doubled. If he hadn't upgraded to *Iron Body*, his brain would have boiled in its fluid. The physical durability of his skull was holding the pressure in, acting as a containment vessel for the psychic nuclear reaction.
*Analyze the source,* Su Yuan commanded.
The combined processing power of 3,450 human minds, guided by an ancient AI, fell upon the virus. They tore it apart. They stripped the skin off the code to see the bone underneath.
It wasn't just a virus. It was a homing beacon. It was trying to find *The Architect*.
It was trying to find him.
"Found you," Su Yuan whispered.
He saw the trail. A thick, fiber-optic cable of malicious intent leading back through the phantom relays, up through the firewall of Sector 1, and into the hardened servers of a corporate black-site.
*Arasaka-Hui Systems. Sub-basement 3. Server Cluster 'Onyx'.*
They were watching the purge from there. Probably sipping coffee. Probably laughing as the red dots on their screens turned to black.
Su Yuan felt a cold, sharp rage. It wasn't the hot anger of a brawler. It was the absolute zero of a judge passing sentence.
"Genesis," Su Yuan thought. "Do we have the virus schematic?"
**[ AFFIRMATIVE. REVERSE-ENGINEERING COMPLETE. ]**
"Rewrite the payload," Su Yuan said. "Change the target coordinates."
**[ TARGET? ]**
"Return to sender."
He gathered the fragmented pieces of the virus from the thousands of minds holding them. He pulled the pain, the fear, the burning heat from *Rat_Boy_09*'s head, from the weeping girl in Sector 4, from the old man in the factory.
He balled it up into a single, dense sphere of data.
Then, he shoved it back down the connection.
*Bounce.*
***
**Arasaka-Hui Black Site. Sector 1.**
Technician Lei watched the screens with a bored expression. The *Digital Purge* was running smoothly. The graph showed a satisfying drop in neural activity in the lower sectors.
"Cleaning up the trash," Lei muttered, taking a sip of his nutrient drink.
"Efficiency is up to 94%," his partner noted. "The Architect's network is collapsing. We should have a trace on the source node in... wait."
The screen flickered.
The red lines representing the virus stopped moving forward. They froze.
"Latency spike?" Lei asked.
"No," his partner said, leaning closer. "The data stream... it reversed."
Lei frowned. "That's impossible. It's a read-only execution."
"It's not read-only anymore," the partner whispered. His face went pale. "It's writing."
On the main wall, the status indicators for Server Cluster Onyx turned from green to amber.
Then to red.
Then to black.
A low, vibrating hum filled the room. It came from the floor beneath them—the cooling units for the mainframes.
"Shut it down!" Lei screamed, slamming his hand on the emergency cut-off.
The switch did nothing. The code was locked.
The hum rose to a shriek.
Sparks showered from the ceiling. The monitors on Lei's desk exploded outward, sending shards of glass into his face. He fell back, clawing at his eyes.
Smoke—thick, black, and smelling of melted silicon—poured from the vents.
In the server room below, rows of million-credit processors were vibrating. They were resonating.
They were screaming with the voice of three thousand slum-dwellers.
*Crack.*
The ceramic casings of the hard drives shattered. The coolant lines burst, hissing steam into the superheated air.
It wasn't just a crash. It was a slagging. The virus, amplified by the anger of its intended victims, ate the hardware alive.
In thirty seconds, Arasaka-Hui's primary cyber-warfare division went dark.
***
**Troop Transport.**
Su Yuan gasped, sucking in a lungful of the foul air.
The pressure in his head vanished instantly.
He slumped forward, sweat dripping from his chin onto the metal floor. His nose was still bleeding, staining his grey fatigues.
"Hey!" The pink-haired girl was shaking his shoulder. "Hey! Are you dying?"
Su Yuan swatted her hand away. It was a weak gesture, devoid of his usual strength.
He checked the Net.
Silence.
The screaming had stopped.
**[ THREAT NEUTRALIZED. ]**
**[ SERVER CLUSTER 'ONYX': DESTROYED. ]**
**[ CONNECTION STATUS: STABLE. ]**
Slowly, tentatively, the nodes began to flicker back to normal.
*Rat_Boy_09: Alive. Headache gone.*
*Void_Walker: System rebooting... What was that?*
They didn't know what had happened. They only knew that the fire had come, and then, something massive—something dark and terrible and protective—had stood in front of them and swallowed the flames.
A wave of emotion washed over Su Yuan. It wasn't data. It was raw feeling.
Gratitude. Awe. Submission.
They realized, on a subconscious level, that they belonged to him now. He hadn't just given them a skill; he had saved their souls.
**[ USER LOYALTY INCREASED. ]**
**[ CURRENT FAITH RESONANCE: 14%. ]**
**[ SOUL POINTS ACCUMULATED: 12,000. ]**
Su Yuan wiped the blood from his upper lip with the back of his hand. He looked at the blood—dark, heavy, metallic.
"I'm fine," he croaked to the girl.
She looked at him with wide eyes. "You were seizing. Your eyes... they were glowing blue."
"Trick of the light," Su Yuan muttered. He leaned his head back against the hull.
The transport began to slow down. The gears ground down, shifting lower.
"We're here," a voice from the front shouted.
The rear hatch hissed. Hydraulics whined, lowering the ramp.
Daylight flooded in, but it wasn't the filtered, soft light of the city. It was harsh, yellow, and unfiltered. Dust motes danced in the beam, thick and grainy.
Su Yuan stood up. His legs felt shaky for a moment, then the *Iron Body* reinforced him, locking his knees.
He walked down the ramp.
The Wastelands stretched out before them. It was a graveyard of the old world—twisted skeletons of skyscrapers jutting out of dunes of grey sand, rusted husks of war machines half-buried in the dirt. The sky was the color of a bruise, purple and brown.
Fifty students stumbled out into the wind. They looked small. Fragile.
Su Yuan took a deep breath. The air tasted of sulfur and ash. It tasted free.
The Spire couldn't see him here. The cameras were blind. The sensors were scattered.
He looked at the horizon.
*You tried to burn my house down,* Su Yuan thought, directing his intent back toward the city that loomed behind them like a fortress wall. *You tried to fry my people.*
He clenched his fist. The air popped.
*You missed.*
"Form up!" a Proctor yelled, standing on the roof of the transport in a sealed environmental suit. "Welcome to hell, maggots. Anything outside the perimeter lights eats meat. Try not to be the appetizer."
Su Yuan adjusted his pack. He felt the Genesis Protocol humming, fed and fat on the destruction of the Onyx server.
He wasn't the appetizer.
He walked toward the edge of the camp, his boots sinking into the ash. He watched a lizard the size of a dog skitter under a piece of rebar.
The game had changed. In the city, he had to be a ghost. Here?
Here, he could be the monster.
**[ NEW OBJECTIVE: DOMINATION. ]**
**[ AVAILABLE RESOURCES: 50 STUDENTS (EXPENDABLE). 3,450 NODES (REMOTE). ]**
**[ START? ]**
Su Yuan smiled. It was a jagged thing, sharp as the rusted metal around him.
"Start."