The sub-basement air tasted of copper and dead time.
Su Yuan didn't leave the Alpha Site. Not yet. The "Admin Privilege" he had scraped from the frying console of the Genesis terminal was burning a virtual hole in his peripheral vision. It was a jagged fragment of code, greyed out and heavy, but it pulled him deeper into the dark like a compass needle finding North.
He walked past the rows of silent, dark tanks where the dead now truly slept. The silence was absolute. No hum of coolant, no wet gurgle of filtration. Just the sound of his boots on the metal grating.
He followed the pull. It led him away from the exit, down a service ramp that spiraled into the earth's crust.
The walls here weren't glass and steel. They were rough-hewn rock reinforced with heavy iron ribs. This was older than the Alpha Site. This was the foundation.
He reached a bulkhead door. It didn't have a keypad or a scanner. It had a physical wheel, rusted shut, large enough for a ship.
Su Yuan placed his hand on the cold iron.
[ LOCATION DETECTED: ARMORY 0-B. ]
[ ACCESS: ADMIN FRAGMENT 1/9 REQUIRED. ]
[ UNLOCKING... ]
The metal groaned. It wasn't a mechanical sound; it was the shriek of iron waking up after a century-long nap. Dust rained from the ceiling. The wheel turned on its own, grinding against the rust, spinning with a torque that would have snapped Su Yuan's arm if he hadn't stepped back.
The door swung inward.
Inside, the air was dry. Zero percent humidity. Preservation grade.
The room was a hangar, vast and shadowed. In the center, illuminated by the faint, dying glow of emergency radium strips, sat a machine.
It wasn't a weapon. Not exactly.
It was a cube of matte-black metal, three meters on each side, hooked into the floor by thick cables that looked like arteries. The surface shifted slightly, like oil on water.
[ ITEM IDENTIFIED: THE SOUL FORGE. ]
[ GRADE: PROTOTYPE / FORBIDDEN. ]
[ FUNCTION: FUSION OF MATERIAL AND ETHER. ]
Su Yuan approached it. The Genesis Protocol in his head remained silent, but the hunger was there. A low vibration at the base of his skull. This was what the system wanted. This was the hardware that made the software matter.
"Fusion," Su Yuan muttered. The ability to hammer a skill into a sword. The ability to weave a soul into a circuit board.
He reached for the console attached to the cube. A data port waited, open and hungry.
"System. Download schematic. Prepare for physical extraction."
[ INITIATING... ]
[ WARNING: SECURITY MEASURES ACTIVE. ]
Su Yuan paused. "What security?"
The darkness in the corner of the hangar shifted.
It hadn't looked like a threat. It had looked like a pile of scrap metal—a confused heap of pistons, hydraulics, and ceramic plating collapsed against the far wall.
Now, the scrap heap stood up.
It rose to a height of four meters. Dust cascaded off its shoulders like a waterfall. It was bipedal, but the proportions were wrong. The arms were too long, ending in three-fingered claws designed to tear through tank armor. The head was a sensor cluster buried deep within a heavy cowl of rusted steel.
A single red optic flared to life. It didn't glow steady; it strobed, cycling through combat algorithms.
[ THREAT DETECTED: SENTINEL MARK IV. ]
[ STATUS: CORRUPTED. ]
[ OBJECTIVE: PROTECT THE FORGE. ]
Su Yuan stepped back from the console. He calculated the distance to the door. Fifty meters.
The Sentinel took a step. The floor shook.
It moved with a terrifying, jerky speed—the kind of movement that bypassed momentum. One second it was still; the next, it was ten meters closer.
"Disengage," Su Yuan said, his voice calm despite the spike in his heart rate. "I have Admin authorization."
The Sentinel stopped. Its head ticked to the side. A speaker on its chest crackled, emitting a sound like grinding gears.
"ADMINISTRATION... DEAD," the voice synthesized, distorted by decades of decay. "PROTOCOL... PURGE... ALL... INTRUDERS."
It lunged.
Su Yuan didn't try to block. You don't block a freight train.
He triggered Flowing Mercury Steps. He threw himself sideways, hitting the concrete in a roll.
The air where he had been standing evaporated. A hydraulic fist slammed into the floor, cratering the reinforced concrete. Chips of stone flew like shrapnel. One slice of rock cut Su Yuan's cheek, hot and sharp.
He scrambled up.
Wind Blade.
He slashed his hand through the air. The vacuum cutter, invisible and razor-sharp, struck the Sentinel's elbow joint.
CLANG.
Sparks flew. The blade didn't even scratch the paint. The ceramic plating was designed to withstand orbital re-entry. An F-Rank skill was like throwing a pebble at a tank.
The Sentinel swiveled. It didn't turn its body; its waist rotated 180 degrees with a mechanical whine. The claw lashed out again.
Su Yuan ducked. The wind of the swing ruffled his hair.
He was fast. The cultivation, the Lightning Weave residue, the sheer adrenaline—it made him faster than any human had a right to be.
But the machine wasn't human. It didn't tire. It didn't hesitate. It ran on math.
Calculation: Impact in 0.4 seconds.
Su Yuan jumped. He vaulted off the Sentinel's knee joint, flipping over its head.
He landed near the Soul Forge.
"System! Weakness analysis!"
[ TARGET ARMOR: IMPENETRABLE TO CURRENT OUTPUT. ]
[ PHYSICAL DEFEAT: IMPOSSIBLE. ]
[ SUGGESTION: RUN. ]
"I can't run," Su Yuan hissed. "I need the Forge."
The Sentinel turned. It raised its arm. A panel on its forearm slid back, revealing the rotary barrel of a heavy-caliber riot gun.
Su Yuan dove behind the Soul Forge's black cube just as the gun spun up.
BRRRRRT.
Bullets hammered the Forge. They ricocheted with angry whines, sparking off the indestructible metal.
Su Yuan pressed his back against the cube. He was pinned. He had maybe ten seconds before the mech flanked him or decided to just punch through the Forge to get to him.
He looked at the Sentinel. It was a machine. It had an OS.
"It has no soul," Su Yuan whispered. "But it has a mind."
He closed his eyes.
"System. Establish connection. Hard line if you have to."
[ TARGET IS NON-BIOLOGICAL. SOULNET INCOMPATIBLE. ]
"Everything is data," Su Yuan snapped. "It has a processor. It has logic gates. Bridge the signal. Treat its CPU like a brain."
[ ATTEMPTING HANDSHAKE... ]
[ SIGNAL BLOCKED. MILITARY GRADE FIREWALL DETECTED. ]
The shooting stopped. Heavy, metallic footsteps crunched toward his position.
Su Yuan didn't have a hacking deck. He didn't have a terminal.
He had the City.
"Open the floodgates," Su Yuan ordered.
[ WARNING: RANGE EXTENSION REQUIRED. ]
[ CONNECTING TO SECTOR 7 SURFACE GRID... ]
He pushed his mind upward. Through the rock, through the sewers, into the sleeping city above.
It was night in Sector 7. The exhausted, the poor, the desperate were sleeping in their hab-blocks.
Su Yuan didn't ask for their permission this time. He didn't have time to be polite. He grabbed them.
Ten thousand minds.
He didn't take their energy. He took their noise.
The dreams of a factory worker. The anxiety of a student. The fragmented, drug-fueled hallucinations of a stim-addict. The nursery rhyme stuck in a mother's head.
He pulled it all down into the dark.
[ NODE COUNT: 10,432. ]
[ DATA TYPE: CHAOS. ]
[ CPU LOAD: CRITICAL. ]
His head felt like it was splitting. Blood gushed from his nose, soaking his collar. The noise was deafening—a cacophony of ten thousand people whispering, screaming, and crying in his ear.
The Sentinel rounded the corner of the Forge. Its red eye locked onto Su Yuan.
"TARGET... ACQUIRED."
Su Yuan looked up. His eyes were bloodshot, glowing with a faint, terrible grey light.
"Check your email," Su Yuan whispered.
He thrust his hand forward.
He didn't fire a wind blade. He fired the human condition.
He slammed the collective consciousness of ten thousand sleeping humans directly into the Sentinel's receiver port.
[ PAYLOAD DELIVERED. ]
The Sentinel froze.
Inside its processor, the rigid, binary world of 1s and 0s was suddenly invaded by the color blue. By the smell of rain on asphalt. By the crushing existential dread of a mid-life crisis.
Logic Error.
The Sentinel's optic flickered wildly. It raised its gun, but the barrel didn't spin.
Why? the machine asked.
It wasn't programmed to ask why. It was programmed to execute. But Su Yuan was force-feeding it data that had no execution parameters.
A meme about a cat wanting a cheeseburger overlaid the targeting reticle.
The melody of a pop song from three years ago corrupted the movement drivers.
The fear of death—illogical, messy, human fear—flooded the threat assessment protocols.
"ERROR," the Sentinel boomed. The voice was rising in pitch. "DATA... CORRUPTION. LOGIC... FAILING."
It stumbled back. Its hands clawed at its own head, scraping sparks against the metal cowl.
Su Yuan stood up. He walked toward it.
He kept the channel open. He poured more into it. The pettiness of a neighbor dispute. The heat of lust. The dull ache of grief.
"Process this," Su Yuan said through gritted teeth. "Process a joke you don't understand."
He sent it a paradox.
This statement is false.
The Sentinel stiffened. Its joints locked. The coolant pumps on its back began to whine, screaming higher and higher as the processor overheated, trying to resolve the infinite loop of human absurdity against machine logic.
Steam erupted from the joints.
"SYSTEM... HALT," the Sentinel screeched.
Then, with a sound like a dying whale, the red light in its eye faded to black. The machine slumped forward, crashing to its knees, then tipping over onto its side.
Dead. Not destroyed. Crashed.
Su Yuan cut the connection.
The silence rushed back in, heavy and ringing.
He fell against the side of the Soul Forge, sliding down until he hit the floor. He wiped the blood from his upper lip. His hands were shaking so hard he couldn't make a fist.
[ TARGET NEUTRALIZED. ]
[ METHOD: LOGIC OVERLOAD. ]
[ SOULNET MASTERY INCREASED. ]
"Messy," Su Yuan croaked. "But effective."
He looked at the fallen giant. The most advanced killing machine of the previous era, defeated because it couldn't handle the sheer, stupid volume of human thought.
He pulled himself up. He turned back to the Soul Forge.
The console was blinking green. The Guardian was down. The user rights were transferred.
[ DOWNLOADING BLUEPRINTS... ]
[ FORGE STATUS: ONLINE. ]
[ DO YOU WISH TO INTEGRATE? ]
"Yes," Su Yuan said.
The black cube seemed to liquefy. It lost its hard edges, flowing like mercury. It moved toward him.
Su Yuan didn't flinch.
The metal climbed his leg. It felt cold, then searing hot. It wrapped around his waist, snaked up his spine, and dissolved into his skin.
Pain.
It felt like his bones were being plated with lead. He bit his tongue to keep from screaming, tasting iron.
[ INTEGRATION COMPLETE. ]
[ NEW MODULE UNLOCKED: THE SOUL FORGE. ]
[ CAPABILITY: ITEM ENCHANTMENT / SKILL FUSION. ]
[ CURRENT SLOT CAPACITY: 1. ]
It was done. He had the factory in his veins now.
Su Yuan breathed out, long and shaky. He checked his internal clock.
0400 Hours.
He had four hours before his first class.
He looked at the fallen Sentinel one last time.
"Thanks for the practice," he muttered.
He began the long climb back to the surface.
***
The dorm room was quiet.
Su Yuan sat on the edge of his bed. He had scrubbed the sewer filth and the dried blood from his skin in the communal showers, burning his clothes in the incinerator chute.
He wore fresh fatigues. He looked like any other student—tired, pale, stressed.
But under the skin, the Soul Forge hummed.
He pulled the silver locket from his pocket. Instructor Lin's heirloom. The Gatekeeper's Key.
He held it in his palm.
"System," he thought. "Activate Soul Forge."
A holographic interface bloomed in his mind. It wasn't the usual grey text. It was amber, the color of molten metal.
[ SLOT 1: EMPTY. ]
[ SELECT BASE ITEM. ]
Su Yuan focused on the locket.
[ BASE ITEM: GATEKEEPER'S KEY. ]
[ RANK: E (MATERIAL). S (FUNCTION). ]
"Select Catalyst," the system prompted.
Su Yuan hesitated. He didn't have magical ores. He didn't have dragon scales.
But he had souls.
He looked at the stats of the Sentinel he had just defeated. When the mech crashed, the system had logged its residual data. It wasn't a soul, but it was a construct. A "Machine Spirit" of sorts.
[ CATALYST: SENTINEL LOGIC CORE (FRAGMENT). ]
[ TRAIT: UNYIELDING. ]
"Fuse," Su Yuan ordered.
[ WARNING: FUSION SUCCESS RATE 64%. ]
[ FAILURE RISK: ITEM DESTRUCTION. ]
"Do it."
He felt the drain immediately. The Soul Forge pulled energy from his core, twisting it, hammering it.
The locket in his hand grew hot. It glowed with a dull, red light. The silver tarnished, then turned a deep, gunmetal grey. The delicate chain thickened, the links fusing and reshaping into something industrial and angular.
Hiss.
Steam rose from his palm.
[ FUSION SUCCESS. ]
[ ITEM: THE IRON KEY. ]
[ RANK: D. ]
[ ATTRIBUTE ADDED: SENTINEL'S GAZE. ]
[ EFFECT: USER CAN SENSE ELECTRONIC SURVEILLANCE WITHIN 50 METERS. ]
Su Yuan closed his fist around the new key.
Passive radar. He could feel the hidden camera in the hallway outside his door. He could feel the microphone embedded in the fire alarm.
It worked.
He wasn't just a user of the system anymore. He was a manufacturer.
He lay back on the pillow. He was exhausted, his mind frayed from the connection to the city.
But sleep wouldn't come.
Because in the silence of the room, a new notification window popped up. It didn't make a sound. It just appeared, stark white against the dark of his closed eyelids.
[ GENESIS PROTOCOL MESSAGE ]
[ TO: ITERATOR 49 ]
[ FROM: ADMIN ]
[ BODY: INTERESTING TECHNIQUE. USING THE LIVESTOCK TO FIGHT THE SHEPHERD. WE WILL BE WATCHING YOUR NEXT COMPILATION WITH INTEREST. ]
Su Yuan stared at the text.
The "Livestock." That's what it called the ten thousand people he had connected to.
And "The Shepherd." The Sentinel.
The Genesis Protocol hadn't intervened because it wanted the Sentinel to win. It had intervened to see how Su Yuan would win.
It was learning.
Su Yuan swiped the message away.
"Watch all you want," he whispered to the ceiling.
He closed his fist around the Iron Key.
"By the time you figure me out, I'll have rewritten the source code."
He closed his eyes.
Somewhere in the city, a thousand people woke up with a headache they couldn't explain, and a strange, lingering image of a giant metal robot being crushed by the weight of a sad song.
Su Yuan slept. The code compiled in his dreams.