Chapter 32: The Auction of Shadows
The Sunken Garden was not a garden, and it had not seen the sun in forty years. It was a wound in the earth, a collapsed plaza three levels below the Sector 7 sewer main, capped by a geodesic dome of grime-smeared polycarbonate.
It smelled of wet rust and expensive, illicit ozone.
Su Yuan leaned against a pillar wrapped in dead, synthetic ivy. The air here was thick, humid enough to taste. Condensation dripped from the dome above, landing with steady, ticking rhythms on the marble tiles that had been shattered during the riots of the last decade.
He checked his wrist. 22:58.
He wasn't wearing the tactical gear from the Alpha Site. He wore a heavy, charcoal-grey trench coat scavenged from a dead corp-exec, the collar turned up to hide the faint blue glow of the neural port behind his ear.
People were arriving.
They didn't look like people. They looked like salvage.
A figure in a hazmat suit painted with neon gang tags. A woman whose jaw was entirely chrome, steam venting from her cheeks as she breathed. A drone, hovering at eye level, carrying a tablet with a blinking proxy face.
They didn't speak. The Phantom Market was usually digital, a ghostly overlay of code and encryption. Bringing it into the physical world made everyone twitchy. Flesh was vulnerable. Flesh could be shot.
Su Yuan touched the hilt of the *Whisper Blade* under his coat. The steel was cold, sucking the heat right out of his hip.
"System," he subvocalized. "Map the network."
**[ SCANNING LOCAL NODES... ]**
**[ 42 ACTIVE CONNECTIONS DETECTED. ]**
**[ SIGNAL DENSITY: HIGH. ]**
**[ ENCRYPTION: MILITARY GRADE CRACKED / BLACK MARKET CUSTOM. ]**
The interface bloomed in his mind—not a clean list, but a tangled root system of red lines connecting every person in the plaza to the local hub he had set up.
He wasn't just here to sell a knife. He was here to infect the water supply.
A holographic projector in the center of the fountain—dry now, filled with cigarette butts—sputtered to life. It threw a jagged cone of blue light into the air.
**[ AUCTION: GHOST BLADE ]**
**[ SELLER: ARCHITECT ]**
**[ VERIFICATION: COMPLETE ]**
The crowd tightened. There were maybe fifty of them, representing the worst scum Sector 7 had to offer. The gangs. The organ harvesters. The info-brokers.
Su Yuan stepped away from the pillar. He walked into the light.
He didn't announce himself. He just took the knife from his belt and placed it on the floating mag-lev pedestal in the center of the fountain.
The blade looked dull. It was a piece of grey, thirsty metal that seemed to absorb the hologram's light rather than reflect it.
"It cuts shields," Su Yuan said. His voice was modified by a throat-patch, coming out as a grinding electronic rasp. "Kinetic. Thermal. Ether-based. It doesn't care."
A laugh from the back. It sounded like gravel in a blender.
"Bullshit," said the man with the chrome jaw—no, the woman. It was hard to tell with the modifications. "Physics doesn't work like that. Even the Spire tech respects the energy laws."
Su Yuan didn't argue. He picked up a scrap of ceramic armor plating he'd brought—Class III ballistic weave, rated to stop a sniper round. He set it upright on the pedestal.
He picked up the knife.
He dropped it.
He didn't throw it. He let gravity do the work.
The grey blade hit the ceramic. There was no screech of metal, no spark. The knife simply *sank*, sliding through the hardened composite as if it were passing through smoke, and embedded itself two inches into the mag-lev generator below.
The generator sparked and died. The pedestal dropped to the concrete with a heavy *thud*.
Silence.
Absolute, greedy silence.
The chrome-jawed woman took a step forward. The drone buzzed lower.
"Bidding is open," Su Yuan said. "I don't want credits. Credits are traceable. I want raw materials. Ether ore. Processor cores. Or Soul Dust."
The frenzy began not with shouting, but with data.
Su Yuan's HUD exploded.
**[ BID: 3KG REFINED ETHER ORE. (SOURCE: RED SYNDICATE) ]**
**[ BID: 2X MILITARY GRADE OPTICS. (SOURCE: VIPER_NEST) ]**
**[ BID: 500G SOUL DUST. (SOURCE: THE BUTCHER) ]**
Su Yuan watched the numbers climb. But he wasn't looking at the price.
He was looking at the connections.
Every time someone placed a bid, they had to ping the local hub. They had to open a handshake protocol with Su Yuan's system to verify their funds.
A handshake requires two hands.
"System," Su Yuan thought, his mind cold and sharp. "Deploy the bugs. Piggyback on the verification packets."
**[ INITIATING INJECTION... ]**
**[ TARGETS: 42. ]**
**[ PAYLOAD: LISTENING_WORM_V1.0. ]**
It was a dirty trick. A hacker's sucker punch.
Su Yuan visualized the code. It wasn't elegant streams of binary. It was a swarm of microscopic, digital ticks.
He sent them down the connection lines.
The chrome-jawed woman's neural link flashed red for a microsecond as she bid. *Injection successful.*
The drone pilot, miles away, controlling the machine via encrypted relay. *Injection successful.*
The silent man in the back, wrapped in rags that smelled of formaldehyde. *Injection successful.*
They were buying a weapon, but they were selling their privacy.
The bids escalated.
**[ BID: CLASS-B MECH CHASSIS (DAMAGED). ]**
**[ BID: ACCESS CODES TO SECTOR 4 WASTE DISPOSAL. ]**
"Too low," Su Yuan rasped. He leaned against the dead pedestal, arms crossed. "You're bidding on godhood. You're bidding on the ability to shank a Spire Enforcer through his riot shield. Do better."
The greed in the room was a physical pressure. It pushed against his temples. The *SoulNet* fed on it. The ambient energy of fifty desperate, violent souls spiked the air.
Su Yuan drew on it. He siphoned off the excess emotion, using it to fuel the encryption on his bugs, burying them deeper into the buyers' subroutines. They wouldn't find the malware for weeks. By then, he'd know where they slept, who they worked for, and what they feared.
"One kilo of Originium," a voice said.
It wasn't a digital bid. It was spoken aloud.
The crowd parted.
The speaker stood at the edge of the fountain. He was tall, wearing a suit that was too clean for Sector 7. White synth-silk, tailored to hide the bulge of a shoulder holster. His face was unmasked, but his eyes were replaced by solid black glass.
Upper City.
The whispers started immediately. The rats recognized a hawk.
"Originium," Su Yuan repeated.
His heart skipped a beat. Originium wasn't fuel. It was a catalyst. It was the volatile, semi-sentient rock used to power the core mainframes of the Spire. A kilo of it could power a city block for a year—or overload the *Soul Forge* enough to crack the next level of encryption.
"Refined," the man said. His voice was smooth, synthetic velvet. "Unmarked. And I'll throw in a clean ID chip. Upper City clearance, Level 1."
The gangs went silent. They couldn't compete with that. The Red Syndicate representative spat on the floor and turned away. The drone hovered back, its camera lens contracting in disappointment.
Su Yuan looked at the man.
**[ ANALYSIS: TARGET UNKNOWN. ]**
**[ THREAT LEVEL: EXTREME. ]**
**[ SIGNAL MASKING: ACTIVE. ]**
This man didn't have a standard neural link. He was shielded. Su Yuan's listening bugs bounced off his firewall like rain off a windshield.
"Who are you?" Su Yuan asked.
"A curator," the man said. He walked forward, his shoes clicking on the wet tiles. "I collect anomalies. And that..." He pointed a gloved finger at the *Whisper Blade*. "...is an anomaly. It reeks of code that shouldn't exist."
He stopped three feet from Su Yuan.
"Do we have a deal, Architect?"
Su Yuan calculated.
Giving this weapon to a ganger was one thing. A ganger would use it to rob a liquor store or settle a turf war.
Giving it to the Upper City... that was arming the enemy.
But the Originium. The Soul Forge was starving. The Alpha Site data was locked behind energy walls he couldn't breach with his current output.
"The ID chip," Su Yuan said. "Blank slate?"
"Registered to a deceased technician. You can walk through the checkpoints at dawn."
Su Yuan reached out. He grabbed the *Whisper Blade*.
For a second, he thought about stabbing the man. Driving the grey steel through the white suit, through the shielding, just to see what color an Upper City elite bled.
But the *Genesis Protocol* was watching. Not directly—the silence was still there—but the weight of the system was heavy. Killing a high-value target in public would bring down the hammer before he was ready to catch it.
He flipped the knife. He held it out, handle first.
"Sold."
The man in white didn't flinch. He took the knife. He pulled a metal canister from his jacket—heavy, lead-lined—and placed it on the pedestal. Next to it, he laid a small, translucent chip.
"Pleasure doing business," the man said.
He turned. He didn't check the knife. He didn't gloat. He walked away, the crowd parting for him like oil around a drop of soap.
Su Yuan grabbed the canister and the chip.
"Show's over," he announced.
He didn't wait for the crowd to disperse. He vaulted over the rim of the fountain and headed for the service exit, moving fast.
***
The tunnels back to the safehouse were quiet. The rats were smart enough to stay hidden.
Su Yuan didn't relax. He kept the *Iron Key* in his hand, its passive radar sweeping the dark for electronic ghosts.
He had the Originium. He had the money.
But he had failed to bug the buyer.
"System," he muttered. "Replay the transaction data for the White Suit."
**[ ACCESSING LOGS... ]**
**[ ERROR. DATA CORRUPTED. ]**
**[ USER SIGNATURE ERASED. ]**
"He scrubbed it," Su Yuan whispered. "In real-time."
He stopped walking. A drip of sewage water landed on his shoulder.
The man in white hadn't just bought the knife. He had inspected Su Yuan. The handshake hadn't been a one-way street.
Su Yuan closed his eyes. He dove into his own internal architecture, checking the *SoulNet* core.
He found it.
A tiny, white flag planted in his firewall.
It wasn't a virus. It wasn't an attack. It was a bookmark.
**[ MESSAGE FOUND. ]**
**[ SENDER: CELESTIAL_9 ]**
**[ CONTENT: "Don't be late for the revolution." ]**
Su Yuan opened his eyes. His breath hitched.
*Celestial.*
That wasn't a name. That was a rank. The Celestials were the ruling council of the Spire. The untouchables. The ones who wrote the laws of physics that governed this digital hellscape.
He had just sold a shield-breaking knife to one of the gods he was trying to kill.
"Fuck," Su Yuan said. The word was flat, swallowed by the tunnel gloom.
He gripped the canister of Originium tighter.
He had given them a weapon. True.
But he had forty-one other buyers tonight. Forty-one criminals, scumbags, and killers who were now unknowingly connected to his private network.
He pulled up the map in his mind.
Forty-one red dots pulsed in the dark of Sector 7. He could hear them. He could hear the chrome-jawed woman haggling for batteries. He could hear the drone pilot cursing at his screen. He could hear the heartbeat of the city's underworld, syncing up with his own.
He hadn't bugged the King. But he had enslaved the pawns.
"Fair trade," Su Yuan whispered.
He started walking again, faster now. The Originium in the canister hummed, a low, radioactive vibration that made his teeth ache.
He needed to get to the Soul Forge. He needed to burn this rock and unlock the next fragment of the Admin code.
Because if the Celestials were watching, if they were *participating*, then the timeline had accelerated. They weren't waiting for the Genesis Protocol to reboot. They were making moves.
Su Yuan emerged from the sewer grate into the alley behind his apartment block. The rain had started again—acidic, yellow rain that hissed against the pavement.
He looked up at the Spire, piercing the smog layers miles above. The lights of the Upper City were a halo of gold and white.
"I gave you a knife," Su Yuan said to the distant lights.
He touched the neural port behind his ear.
"Now I'm going to build the hand that holds it."
He keyed the door to his building. The lock clicked.
Inside, the shadows were deep. But for the first time since he arrived in this world, Su Yuan didn't feel alone in the dark.
He had forty-one pairs of eyes out there. And they were all looking exactly where he told them to.
**[ SOULNET STATUS: EXPANDING. ]**
**[ NODE COUNT: 10,473. ]**
**[ COMPUTING POWER: F+ ]**
It was rising.
Su Yuan climbed the stairs, the canister heavy in his hand, the sound of the rain drowning out the beat of his own heart. The auction was over. The war had just begun.