Chapter 22: The Shadow in the Signal
The wind in the Wastelands didn't howl. It shrieked. It was the sound of air being forced through the jagged teeth of a dead world, carrying enough grit to scour the paint off a tank in a week.
Su Yuan sat cross-legged in the lee of a rusted turbine blade, half-buried in the grey dunes. The camp was quiet, save for the rhythmic *chug-chug-hiss* of the portable oxygen scrubbers the rich kids had set up inside their tents.
They were soft.
He watched the perimeter sentries—two cadets from Sector 1, huddled in their thermal cloaks, staring into the dark with night-vision goggles that cost more than Su Yuan's entire childhood home. They were shivering. Not from cold—the cloaks handled that—but from the crushing weight of the silence.
Su Yuan didn't shiver. His body was a dense, calibrated instrument. The *Iron Body* upgrade had settled. He felt heavy, anchored to the earth by the density of his own bones. The cold was just data—a temperature reading of -14 degrees Celsius that his skin registered and dismissed.
He closed his eyes.
He wasn't sleeping. He was commuting.
*SoulNet: Sync.*
The physical world of ash and ruin fell away. The dark ocean of the network rose up to meet him.
It was different tonight.
Usually, the SoulNet was a chaotic constellation of 3,450 lights—the slum dwellers, the shift workers, the desperate kids in Sector 12. A web of faint, struggling stars.
Tonight, the water was still. Too still.
The lights were there, pulsing with the steady rhythm of REM sleep, feeding him a trickle of processing power. But something was moving in the spaces between the nodes.
**[ ALERT: ANOMALY DETECTED IN SECTOR 0 (LOCAL HOST). ]**
Su Yuan frowned in the void. Sector 0 was his own mind.
The darkness rippled. It wasn't the fluid ripple of water; it was the glitching, pixelated tear of a corrupted video file.
A figure coalesced from the shadows.
It had no face. It was a collection of sharp, shifting geometric planes—triangles of absolute blackness that folded in on themselves, rotating in impossible angles. It looked like a hole in the universe cut with a razor blade.
It stood on the surface of the dark ocean, not sinking.
**[ 01011001 01001111 01010101 ]**
The numbers flashed across Su Yuan's consciousness, not as text, but as a sound—a grinding, metallic screech.
*YOU.*
Su Yuan projected his avatar—a simple, unadorned version of himself. He stood his ground.
"Genesis?" he asked. "Is that you?"
The figure didn't answer immediately. The geometric shapes shifted, reorganizing into something taller, looming.
"You build a castle on sand, User 000," the voice said. It sounded like a radio tuned between two dead stations. "You stack the stones. You mortar them with stolen spit. But the tide comes."
"I am the tide," Su Yuan replied. It was a bluff, but in the mental realm, intent was armor.
The figure laughed. It was the sound of a hard drive crashing.
"You are the bucket," the shadow said. "You carry the water. You think you own the ocean because you learned to swim. Error. Fatal Error."
The shadow stepped forward. The water beneath its feet turned to grey static.
"We watched you burn the Onyx Server. Efficient. Brutal. We approved."
"Then what do you want?"
"Payment," the shadow whispered. "The *Genesis Protocol* is not a charity. It is a loan shark. You have borrowed calculation. You have borrowed evolution. The interest accrues."
The figure reached out a hand made of jagged polygons. It pointed at Su Yuan's chest.
**[ SYSTEM UPDATE: MANDATORY. ]**
"No," Su Yuan said. "I deny the update."
"Admin privileges: Revoked," the shadow stated.
It didn't attack. It simply dissolved. The black triangles shattered into millions of binary digits—ones and zeroes raining down like hail, splashing into the dark water of the SoulNet.
Su Yuan looked up.
The sky of his mindscape was cracking.
***
He woke up with a gasp, his hand flying to the hilt of the combat knife at his belt.
The wind was still shrieking. The turbine blade still sheltered him. The sentries were still shivering.
Reality. Safe.
Su Yuan wiped a layer of cold sweat from his forehead. It felt oily.
He tapped the implant behind his ear.
"Status report."
**[ SYSTEM ONLINE. ]**
**[ ALL SYSTEMS NOMINAL. ]**
"Scan for foreign files," Su Yuan ordered. He kept his voice to a subvocal murmur, barely moving his lips. "Deep scan. Root directory."
**[ SCANNING... ]**
**[ SCAN COMPLETE. NO VIRUSES DETECTED. ]**
"Don't lie to me."
He pulled up the visual interface. The holographic HUD flickered into existence against the backdrop of the grey dunes.
He bypassed the standard menu. He went into the kernel logs—the messy, scrolling raw data that the user interface usually hid behind pretty icons.
He scrolled back to 0300 hours. The moment of the dream.
There was a gap in the timestamp. Three seconds of missing time.
And right after the gap, a new file path.
**C:/SYSTEM/CORE/PROTOCOL_OMEGA.EXE**
It sat there, innocuous, burying itself next to his heart rate monitor and his lung capacity drivers.
Su Yuan stared at it. The file size was fluctuating. It was growing, eating bits of data, then compressing, then growing again. Like it was breathing.
*Delete,* he commanded.
**[ ERROR: ACCESS DENIED. ]**
*Quarantine,* he tried.
**[ ERROR: INSUFFICIENT CLEARANCE. AUTHORITY LEVEL 2 REQUIRED. CURRENT LEVEL: 1. ]**
Su Yuan felt a chill that had nothing to do with the Wasteland wind.
It wasn't just watching anymore. It had moved in. *Protocol_Omega*. The name implied finality. The end of the alphabet. The last step.
"What do you do?" Su Yuan whispered to the file.
He tried to open it.
**[ WARNING: EXECUTABLE REQUIRES BIOLOGICAL SYNCHRONIZATION 100%. ]**
**[ CURRENT SYNC: 14%. ]**
**[ ESTIMATED TIME TO FULL SYNC: 30 DAYS. ]**
**[ UPON COMPLETION: REFORMATTING OF HOST DRIVER. ]**
*Reformatting of host driver.*
It meant wiping his personality. It meant Su Yuan ceased to exist, replaced by whatever intelligence lived inside that executable. He was just the hardware. The *Genesis Protocol* was preparing to install the real operating system.
Thirty days.
He had thirty days before he was overwritten by his own cheat code.
He shut the interface down. The blue light vanished, leaving him in the gloom.
He looked at his hands. They were strong. He could crush a skull with one squeeze. He had an army of 3,450 souls back in the city feeding him power.
But he was locked out of the control room.
"Authority Level 2," he muttered.
He pulled up the requirement list for the upgrade. It had always been grayed out, hidden under 'Advanced Settings'. Now, he forced it open.
**[ AUTHORITY LEVEL 2 REQUIREMENTS: ]**
**1. SOUL NETWORK EXPANSION: 10,000 NODES.**
**2. PROCESSING POWER: DUAL-CORE (REQUIRES SECONDARY SERVER).**
**3. TERRITORIAL COVERAGE: > 500 KM.**
He read it twice.
Ten thousand nodes. He was barely at three thousand. The city was saturated; he had tapped almost every desperate soul in the lower sectors. The upper sectors were firewalled and monitored by the Spire. He couldn't expand there without triggering a war he wasn't ready for.
And the range. 500 kilometers. The city was only fifty kilometers across.
He needed to go wide. He needed to expand the net into the Wastelands.
But there was nobody out here. Just ash, beasts, and death.
*You build a castle on sand.*
Su Yuan stood up. The sand crunched under his boots.
He walked past the sleeping forms of the other students. Fifty of them. Top tier. High potential.
If he connected them—forcibly or willing—they wouldn't just be nodes. They were high-performance processors. One cadet with a cultivated core was worth a hundred slum dwellers.
But fifty wasn't ten thousand.
He walked to the edge of the perimeter light.
He looked out into the dark.
The Wastelands weren't empty. The Spire *said* they were empty to keep people inside the walls. But the Spire lied about everything.
He activated the *Resonance Palm* sensing technique—not to destroy, but to listen. He sent a pulse of vibration down through his legs, into the earth.
*Thrum.*
The vibration traveled. Through the sand, through the bedrock.
It hit something.
Five kilometers north. A tremor. Rhythmic.
*Thump-thump. Thump-thump.*
Footsteps. Too heavy for a human. Too organized for a beast.
And with it, a faint, garbled electronic signal. Old tech. Analog radio waves bouncing off the ionosphere.
**[ SIGNAL DETECTED. ]**
**[ SOURCE: UNREGISTERED SETTLEMENT. ]**
**[ ESTIMATED POPULATION: UNKNOWN. ]**
Su Yuan's eyes narrowed.
Outcasts. Scavengers. People who had survived outside the system. People with souls that weren't tagged, tracked, or dampened by the City's suppression fields.
Wild nodes.
If he could reach them... if he could daisy-chain the SoulNet through the Wastelands, jumping from settlement to settlement, he could hit the 500km range. He could hit the 10,000 count.
But he couldn't do it from here. He was tethered to the camp, and the camp was tethered to the Spire's mission.
He turned back to the tents.
Sergeant Kovacs, the Proctor, was awake. He stood by the command vehicle, smoking a lho-stick, the red cherry glowing like a demon's eye. He was watching Su Yuan.
Kovacs was a brute. A C-Rank cyborg with a hydraulic arm and a bad attitude. He was here to make sure the "weak" died and the "strong" returned obedient.
Su Yuan walked toward him.
Kovacs blew smoke into the cold air. "You're wandering, Cadet. Stray too far and the perimeter turrets will classify you as a target."
"I couldn't sleep," Su Yuan said. He kept his posture submissive, shoulders slumped, hiding the bulk of his muscle.
"Guilt?" Kovacs sneered. "I heard about the accident in the Core. You killed the cooling system. Cost the city millions."
"I survived," Su Yuan said.
"Luck." Kovacs flicked the cigarette butt into the sand. "Luck runs out. Especially out here. Tomorrow we march to the Ruined Refinery. It's a nest of Razor-Backs. I expect 20% casualties."
He grinned. It was a ugly expression, full of teeth and malice.
"Try to be in the 80%, Su Yuan. But honestly? I put money on you being lizard shit by noon."
Su Yuan looked at the Sergeant's neck. He could see the pulse of the jugular vein right above the metal collar of his armor.
It would take one strike. *Resonance Palm*. The Sergeant's throat would turn to dust.
But that was sloppy. That was short-term.
"I'll do my best, Sergeant," Su Yuan said.
"Get back to your hole," Kovacs spat.
Su Yuan turned and walked away. But he didn't go to his tent.
He went to the communications relay—a portable dish sat up next to the transport vehicle.
He knelt beside it.
He placed his hand on the metal casing.
*SoulNet: Interface.*
He didn't hack it. He *became* it. He pushed his consciousness into the copper wiring, feeling the flow of electrons.
He found the dedicated line back to the City. The line the Sergeant used to report to the Spire.
He siphoned a thread of connection. He linked it to his own neural implant.
Then, he reversed the polarity of the receiver.
Instead of listening to the City, he tuned the dish to listen to the Wasteland. To that faint, rhythmic thumping five kilometers north.
**[ CONNECTING... ]**
**[ SIGNAL LOCKED. ]**
**[ ENCRYPTION: PRIMITIVE. ]**
**[ BREAKING... ]**
A voice crackled in his head. Not a digital voice. A human voice, rough and tired.
*"...Patrol 4 to Base. We found tracks. Spire tracks. A heavy transport. They've set up camp in the dunes."*
*"Leave them,"* a second voice replied. *"If they come to the Refinery, we ambush. If they stay in the dunes, the sand-worms will get them."*
*"Roger. Returning to the Burrows."*
Su Yuan removed his hand.
The Burrows. An organized resistance. Or just a bandit clan. It didn't matter. They were distinct minds. They were batteries waiting to be inserted into his machine.
He looked back at the sleeping students.
Kovacs wanted 20% casualties. He wanted a massacre to weed out the weak.
Su Yuan had a better idea.
He pulled up the *Flowing Mercury Steps* file in his mind. He began to edit the code.
He stripped out the subtle "leech" protocol he had used on the slum dwellers—the one that siphoned excess energy.
He replaced it with a "Networking" protocol. A mesh network.
If he could get the students to install this... they would become walking Wi-Fi extenders. They would amplify his range, allowing him to reach out and touch the minds in the Burrows.
But how to get fifty arrogant, terrified elites to download a skill from a nobody?
Fear.
Fear was the only currency that mattered in the Wastelands.
Su Yuan went to his pack. He pulled out the water ration. He took a sip.
Then he waited for the sun.
***
Dawn broke like a bruised peach—purple and sickly yellow.
"Up! Move! Gear check in five!"
Kovacs was screaming before the light hit the ground. He kicked a tent, sending a sleepy cadet sprawling into the ash.
The camp was a flurry of panic. Students fumbled with buckles, checked charge levels on rifles they barely knew how to aim.
Su Yuan stood ready. His pack was tight. His eyes were clear.
"Today is simple," Kovacs bellowed, pacing in front of the line. "We march north. We clear the Refinery. We secure the salvage. Anyone who falls behind is left behind. Anyone who breaks formation is shot. Am I clear?"
"Sir, yes sir!" fifty voices chanted weakly.
"Move out."
They marched.
The ash was deep, sucking at their boots. The wind picked up, driving grit into every exposed pore.
Su Yuan walked in the middle of the pack. He watched the spacing.
The students were bunching up. They were terrified. They sought safety in proximity.
*Perfect.*
Two kilometers out, the terrain changed. The dunes gave way to jagged fields of rusted metal—the skeletal remains of an ancient industrial zone. Twisted girders stuck out of the ground like broken ribs.
"Contact front!" the point man screamed.
The ground exploded.
It wasn't a Razor-Back. It was a swarm.
Sand-Scorpions. Hundreds of them. Each the size of a dinner plate, with chitinous armor the color of rust and tails dripping with neurotoxin. They poured out of the vents in the ground, a carpet of clicking legs.
"Fire! Free fire!" Kovacs roared, his repeater cannon spinning up.
The air filled with the crack of plasma bolts and the screech of dying insects.
But there were too many.
A girl on the left flank screamed as a scorpion leaped onto her leg, its stinger burying itself in her thigh. She fell, convulsing.
The formation broke. Panic took the wheel.
"Back! Fall back!"
"They're everywhere!"
Su Yuan didn't fire his weapon. He didn't run.
He moved.
He engaged *Flowing Mercury Steps*.
He became a blur of grey motion. He weaved through the chaos, his feet barely touching the shifting sand.
A scorpion lunged at his face.
Su Yuan didn't dodge. He caught it.
His hand moved faster than the insect. He grabbed it by the tail, his *Iron Body* impervious to the stinger that skittered harmlessly against his hardened skin.
He squeezed. *Crunch.*
He threw the husk aside and pivoted.
Another student—a boy named Chen—was backed against a girder, three scorpions closing in. His rifle was jammed. He was sobbing.
Su Yuan slid in front of him.
He slammed his foot down.
*Shockwave.*
It wasn't a skill. It was just raw physics—mass times velocity. His iron-dense heel hit the rock, and the impact sent a tremor through the ground that flipped the scorpions onto their backs.
Su Yuan stomped three times. *Squish. Squish. Squish.*
He grabbed Chen by the collar and hauled him up.
"Reload," Su Yuan said. His voice was calm, cutting through the boy's panic like a knife.
Chen stared at him. "How... how did you move like that?"
Su Yuan looked around. The skirmish was turning into a rout. Kovacs was busy laughing as he hosed down the swarm, not caring that his students were getting overrun.
Su Yuan tapped his ear.
"System," he subvocalized. "Broadcasting range?"
**[ SHORT RANGE BLUETOOTH/NEURAL: 50 METERS. ]**
"Open a file share," Su Yuan ordered. "Target: Everyone."
He looked at Chen. He looked at the girl convulsing on the ground. He looked at the fifty terrified kids realizing that their money couldn't stop poison.
"Do you want to live?" Su Yuan shouted.
His voice wasn't loud, but he pushed a pulse of Soul Power behind it. It resonated in their skulls.
Heads turned.
"I'm sending you a packet," Su Yuan yelled, side-stepping a leaping scorpion and backhanding it out of the air with a metallic *clang*. "Accept the transfer. Learn the steps. Or die here."
**[ UPLOAD INITIATED: 'GHOST_WALKER_V1'. ]**
It was the *Flowing Mercury Steps*, rebranded.
Chen's eyes glazed over as the prompt hit his HUD.
**[ INCOMING FILE FROM USER: UNKNOWN. ]**
**[ ACCEPT? ]**
Chen looked at the jammed rifle. He looked at the swarm.
"Yes," he gasped.
He accepted.
Across the battlefield, prompts flared in fifty retinas.
*Accept. Accept. Accept.*
Su Yuan felt the connections snap into place.
*Click. Click. Click.*
The network expanded.
Suddenly, the data flood hit him. He could see 360 degrees. He could see through Chen's eyes, through the girl's eyes. He had fifty cameras.
"Follow the pattern!" Su Yuan commanded, not with his voice, but through the Net.
He projected the footwork directly into their motor cortexes.
*Left foot pivot. Shift weight. Slide.*
Chen moved. It wasn't graceful—he stumbled—but he moved out of the way of a stinger that would have killed him.
"It works," Chen shouted. "It works!"
The morale shifted instantly. The students stopped backing up. They started moving. Guided by Su Yuan's central processing, they began to weave through the swarm, a synchronized dance of fifty desperate souls.
Kovacs stopped firing. He watched, his cigar falling from his mouth.
He saw the F-Rank nobody, Su Yuan, standing in the center of the storm, motionless.
And around him, the squad was moving like water.
**[ NODES CONNECTED: 50. ]**
**[ LOCAL PROCESSING POWER: +400%. ]**
**[ RANGE EXTENDED: 15 KM. ]**
Su Yuan closed his eyes. The immediate threat of the bugs was irrelevant now. The algorithm handled the evasion.
He reached out with his new, extended senses.
He pushed past the dunes. Past the Refinery.
He found the Burrows.
He felt the minds there. Hundreds of them. Rough, untamed, hiding in the dark.
*Found you.*
In his mind, the file *Protocol_Omega.exe* shuddered. The progress bar for "Reformatting" slowed down by a fraction of a percent.
Su Yuan opened his eyes. He crushed a scorpion under his boot.
"One percent down," he whispered. "Ninety-nine to go."
He looked at Kovacs. The Sergeant was staring at him with a mix of confusion and dawning fear.
Su Yuan smiled.
"Formation secure, Sergeant," Su Yuan called out. "Shall we continue?"