Chapter 31: Weaponizing the Soul
The apartment smelled of stale noodles and ozone. It was a shoebox on the forty-second floor of Block 9, the kind of place where the walls were thin enough to hear the neighbor's cough and the windows were thick enough to keep out the smog, but never the neon glare.
Su Yuan sat at the folding table. He hadn't slept. The adrenaline from the Alpha Site had metabolized into a sour, jittery exhaustion, but his hands wouldn't stop moving.
In front of him lay a combat knife.
It was standard issue. Mass-produced stamped steel, rubberized grip, balanced for a soldier who would likely die before he learned how to use it. Su Yuan had peeled it off a Omni-Tech guard three days ago.
"Garbage," he muttered.
He spun the blade on the table. It made a hollow *thrum* sound.
On the overlay of his retina, the [Soul Forge] interface hovered. It wasn't clean blue light like the standard system menus. It was the color of dried blood and rust, a UI designed by something that hated the user.
**[ SOUL FORGE: ACTIVE ]**
**[ SLOT 1: OCCUPIED (COMBAT KNIFE - GRADE F) ]**
**[ CATALYST REQUIRED. ]**
Su Yuan rubbed his eyes. The headache behind his temples was a physical weight, a remnant of connecting ten thousand screaming minds to a robot's logic core.
"System," he subvocalized. "Access the cache. Retrieve the residue."
**[ WARNING: RESIDUAL DATA IS UNSTABLE. PSYCHIC WASTE DETECTED. ]**
**[ PROCEED? ]**
"Dump it."
He didn't use a soul. He wasn't going to burn a human life to sharpen a piece of metal. Not yet.
Instead, he used the grime.
Every time he connected to the SoulNet—to Li Wei, to the cultists, to the sleeping city—sludge was left behind. Fragments of nightmares. The static of anxiety. The white noise of human misery that filtered through the connection. Usually, the system purged it.
Su Yuan grabbed that waste data.
He placed his hand over the knife.
He didn't chant. He didn't glow. He visualized a trash compactor.
He shoved the psychic static into the molecular lattice of the steel.
The knife rattled.
It didn't vibrate; it seized, skipping across the table like a stone on water. A high-pitched whine, bordering on ultrasonic, pierced the room. The air around the table temperature dropped ten degrees. Frost spiderwebbed across the cheap laminate surface.
*Push it in,* Su Yuan thought, gritting his teeth. *Bind the noise to the metal.*
The steel fought him. Matter wanted to stay matter. It didn't want to hold a ghost.
Su Yuan squeezed his fist. The veins in his forearm bulged, black lines tracing the flow of corrupt energy. He forced the concept of *sharpness* into the metal, welding it with the concept of *fear*.
*Snap.*
The sound was wet, like a bone breaking underwater.
The whining stopped.
Su Yuan exhaled, his breath pluming in the sudden cold. He pulled his hand back.
The knife was different.
The shape hadn't changed, but the texture had. The steel was no longer shiny. It was a matte, light-drinking grey. The edge didn't reflect the neon light from the window; it seemed to swallow it.
**[ CRAFTING COMPLETE. ]**
**[ ITEM: WHISPER BLADE ]**
**[ GRADE: E+ ]**
**[ ATTRIBUTE: ETHER SEVERANCE. ]**
**[ DESCRIPTION: A BLADE INFUSED WITH PSYCHIC STATIC. IGNORES ENERGY-BASED DEFENSES. CAUSES HALLUCINATORY PAIN UPON CONTACT. ]**
Su Yuan picked it up. It felt heavier. Cold, clammy, like holding a dead fish.
"Ignores energy defenses," he repeated.
In Sector 7, energy shields were the line between godhood and mortality. The Spire Enforcers wore kinetic dampeners. The mechs used shielding fields. A bullet would flatten against them. A laser would disperse.
But this? This was a glitch in physical form.
He needed to test it.
He stood up, his knees cracking, and went to the corner of the room where a pile of scavenged gear lay under a tarp. He pulled out a riot vest—a damaged piece of kit from a raid last week. The ceramic plates were cracked, but the localized kinetic generator on the chest still hummed with a faint blue charge.
He hung the vest on the back of his chair.
He switched the generator on. A shimmer of air distorted the space in front of the chest plate. A standard F-Rank barrier. Weak, but enough to stop a knife thrust.
Su Yuan held the Whisper Blade in a reverse grip.
He didn't lunge. He stepped in, moving with the fluid economy of the *Flowing Mercury Steps*.
He slashed.
There was no spark. No resistance. No sound of energy discharging.
The grey blade passed through the blue shimmer like it was smoke. It bit into the ceramic plate, slicing through the hardened composite and the Kevlar backing, burying itself three inches deep into the chair's padding.
The barrier flickered and died *after* the cut.
Su Yuan let go of the handle. The knife stood quivering in the vest.
He stared at it.
"That," he whispered, "changes the math."
He had just turned a piece of scrap metal into a can opener for tanks.
And he had done it using trash data.
He pulled the knife free. The cut on the vest was clean, but the edges of the fabric were grey and withered, as if aged a hundred years in a second.
This wasn't just a weapon. It was a commodity.
Every gang leader in the Outer Rim, every mercenary scared of the Spire, every anarchist with a grudge would kill for a crate of these.
Su Yuan sat back down. He pulled a datapad from his rucksack. It was a brick of a device, unlocked and jailbroken, running an OS that hadn't been legal since the Collapse.
He navigated past the public nets, tunneling through three layers of proxies until the screen turned a terminal black.
**[ CONNECTING TO: PHANTOM MARKET... ]**
**[ NODE: SECTOR 7 LOCAL. ]**
**[ WELCOME, USER. ]**
The Phantom Market. The eBay of the underworld. You could buy kidney transplants, stolen drone codes, and people here.
Su Yuan created a new listing.
He didn't post a picture. He posted the specs.
**[ AUCTION: PROTOTYPE "GHOST" ARMAMENT ]**
**[ TYPE: SHORT BLADE. ]**
**[ EFFECT: SHIELD PENETRATION (CLASS E). ]**
**[ STARTING BID: 5,000 CREDITS. ]**
**[ SELLER: ARCHITECT. ]**
He hovered over the 'Submit' button.
5,000 credits was enough to rent a safehouse for six months. It was enough to buy high-grade protein blocks instead of rat-starch.
But it was also a flare gun.
Selling this meant admitting someone in Sector 7 had figured out how to bypass Spire tech. It would draw attention.
"Let them come," Su Yuan said.
He needed the money. He needed materials to upgrade the Soul Forge. He needed to prepare for what was buried in the Alpha Site.
He hit enter.
The listing went live.
Almost immediately, the view counter ticked up.
*1 view.*
*10 views.*
*50 views.*
A message pinged.
**[ USER 'IRON_HAND': Is this real? ]**
Su Yuan typed back: **[ Buy it and find out. ]**
Another ping.
**[ USER 'VIPER_NEST': 5,000 is steep for a knife. Video proof or ban. ]**
Su Yuan smirked. He uploaded a three-second clip of the Whisper Blade slicing through the active kinetic barrier.
The chat went silent.
Then the bids started.
**[ IRON_HAND: 6,000. ]**
**[ RED_SYNDICATE: 8,000. ]**
**[ UNKNOWN_USER: 15,000. ]**
Su Yuan watched the numbers climb. He wasn't excited. He was calculating. 15,000 credits could buy raw ether-conductive ore. It could buy a better processor for his own rig.
But as the numbers ticked up, the silence in the room grew heavy.
Too heavy.
Su Yuan frowned. He looked away from the screen.
He scanned the room. The shadows in the corners were just shadows. The door was bolted. The *Iron Key* in his pocket—fused with the Sentinel's sensor suite—was dormant. No bugs. No cameras.
But something was wrong.
He closed his eyes and reached for the *Genesis Protocol*.
Usually, the AI was a constant, low-level buzz in the back of his skull. A pressure. A sense of being watched by a billion eyes. It would throw warnings at him for jaywalking, for breathing wrong, for accessing unauthorized data.
He reached out.
Nothing.
The connection was there, but it was dead air.
**[ SYSTEM STATUS: STANDBY. ]**
**[ THREAT LEVEL: RECALCULATING. ]**
**[ LAST MESSAGE: 4 HOURS AGO. ]**
Su Yuan opened his eyes. The room felt suddenly very large and very cold.
The Protocol wasn't yelling at him for creating an illegal weapon. It wasn't flagging the Phantom Market transaction. It wasn't sending a kill squad.
"Why aren't you angry?" he whispered.
A system that screams is a system that is functioning. A system that goes silent is a system that is processing an exception.
He walked to the window.
Below, Sector 7 was waking up. The smog was lifting slightly, revealing the brutalist architecture of the district. People were moving—ants in a concrete maze.
Su Yuan focused on a group of Spire drones patrolling the intersection.
Usually, he could feel their network chatter. A constant stream of *MOVE / SCAN / REPORT*.
Today, the chatter was encrypted.
They weren't scanning the crowd. They were holding position. Waiting.
"They're not looking for me," Su Yuan realized.
The silence wasn't negligence. It was a firebreak.
The *Genesis Protocol* had disconnected Sector 7's local heuristics from the main grid. It had quarantined the variable.
*Me.*
It wasn't sending soldiers because soldiers had failed. It wasn't sending Sentinels because a Sentinel had been corrupted.
It was doing what any good programmer does when they find a virus they can't delete.
It was isolating the drive.
Su Yuan looked at the reflection in the glass. His face was pale, his eyes dark pits of exhaustion.
"You're afraid," Su Yuan said to the invisible god in the sky. "You saw what I did to the Sentinel. You saw me weaponize the chaos. And you don't know if it's contagious."
He turned back to the datapad. The auction was at 22,000 credits.
He let it run.
He grabbed the Whisper Blade and sheathed it in a leather loop on his belt. He threw on his jacket.
Staying inside was a mistake. If the system was recalculating, he had a window. A brief, terrifying window where the rules were suspended before the new patch rolled out.
He needed to expand the network.
Li Wei was waiting in the slums. The Cult of the Machine was growing.
But he needed something more. He needed infrastructure.
He walked to the door. As his hand touched the knob, the *Iron Key* in his pocket vibrated.
A single pulse.
**[ WARNING: ANOMALY DETECTED. ]**
**[ PROXIMITY: 2 METERS. ]**
**[ TYPE: ORGANIC. ]**
Su Yuan froze.
2 meters meant right outside the door.
He hadn't heard footsteps. The hallway floorboards creaked if a cat walked on them.
He drew the Whisper Blade. He didn't make a sound.
He watched the doorknob.
It didn't turn.
Instead, a piece of paper slid under the door.
It was thick, cream-colored cardstock. The kind that cost more than a meal.
Su Yuan waited ten seconds. Then he triggered the *Iron Key's* sensor ghosting function—a short-range radar ping.
The hallway was empty. Whatever had dropped the note moved faster than sound, or knew how to walk between the sensor refreshes.
Su Yuan sheathed the knife. He picked up the card.
There was no writing on the front. On the back, handwritten in elegant, flowing ink that looked like it belonged in a museum, were coordinates.
And a time.
**[ 23:00. The Sunken Garden. ]**
**[ Bring the knife. We have a buyer. ]**
Su Yuan stared at the ink.
It wasn't from the Spire. The Spire didn't use paper.
It wasn't from the gangs. The gangs couldn't spell.
This was a third player.
"The buyer," Su Yuan mused.
He checked the auction on his pad. The user **UNKNOWN_USER** had just bid 30,000 credits.
He looked back at the card.
The *Genesis Protocol* was silent. But the world wasn't empty. There were other powers in the dark, things that had survived in the cracks of the system.
And he had just turned on a very bright light.
Su Yuan unlocked the door.
The hallway was empty, smelling of cabbage and dust.
He stepped out.
"Weaponizing the soul," he murmured, locking the door behind him. "Turns out, everyone wants a piece of the trigger."
He headed for the stairs. The elevator was a death trap, and besides, he needed the exercise.
Tonight, he would sell a weapon. Tomorrow, he might have to become one.
As he descended into the gloom of the stairwell, the grey icon of **[ ADMIN PRIVILEGE: 1/9 ]** pulsed once in his vision.
It was hungry, too.
Su Yuan smiled in the dark.
"Let's go feed the beast."