The sky above the Junkyard was the color of a dead channel, tuned to a static gray that tasted of rust and ozone.
Kai pulled his rebreather tighter against his face, the cheap rubber digging into his cheekbones. His breath hitched in his throat, hot and recycled, as he crouched behind the rusted carcass of a pre-War freighter.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
The Geiger counter strapped to his wrist wasn't clicking for radiation; it was detecting active mana-leakage. High-density Qi. The kind that burned unshielded flesh.
"Easy," Kai whispered, his voice barely audible over the howling wind that tore through the canyons of scrap metal. "Don't flush the cache yet."
Below him, in a crater filled with toxic sludge and twisted rebar, a Scrap-Beast was feeding. It was a horrifying amalgamation of biology and refuse—a mutated hound the size of a transport truck, its flesh fused with jagged sheets of corrugated steel. Its eyes were glowing red optical sensors, scavenged from some discarded sentry bot, and it was currently tearing into a leaking fuel cell, lapping up the neon-blue coolant like water.
This was Sector 404. The Error Zone. The ass-end of the Dyson Swarm where the Divine Silicon Sect dumped everything they couldn't format or recycle.
And Kai was hunting.
He didn't have a neural interface. No glowing ports on his neck, no retinal HUD flickering with combat data, no Dantian-Processor humming in his chest. In a world where connection to the Heaven Server was life, Kai was a "Null." A blank space. A walking syntax error.
He reached into his heavy scavenger's coat and pulled out a jagged, meter-long rod of tungsten he'd sharpened to a needle point. He didn't have the spiritual energy to power a vibro-blade or a plasma cutter. He had physics. Mass times acceleration.
Rin needs the meds, he reminded himself, the thought cutting through his fear like a command line. Her rejection syndrome is spiking. If I don't get the core from that beast, she doesn't survive the night.
The beast raised its head, cables shivering along its spine. It let out a metallic growl that vibrated in Kai's teeth. It had sensed something. Not him—Nulls didn't register on mana scans—but the vibration of his heartbeat against the metal ground.
Kai moved.
He didn't cultivate the Dao of Lightning, but he was fast. Born in the filth, surviving on rats and filtered water, his body was lean, scarred, and desperate. He vaulted over the freighter's edge, gravity taking the wheel.
As he fell, the Beast snapped its head up, its optical sensors widening—apertures dilating to focus. It opened a maw filled with spinning drill-bits and serrated blades.
Kai didn't scream. He threw the tungsten rod.
It wasn't a technique. It wasn't a "Soaring Dragon Strike." It was just a heavy metal bar thrown with the precision of a boy who had to kill to eat.
The rod struck the beast in its unarmored throat, right where the organic flesh met the synthetic plating. Dark oil and bright red blood sprayed into the air. The beast shrieked—a sound like grinding gears and a dying animal—and thrashed, smashing its head against the crater walls.
Kai landed in the sludge, rolling to absorb the impact. The toxicity warning on his wrist screamed red, but he ignored it. He scrambled up the pile of trash, his boots slipping on wet plastic.
The beast was wounded, not dead. It swung a massive paw, claws made of rusty excavator teeth slicing the air inches from Kai's face. The wind pressure alone nearly knocked him over.
"System," Kai grunted through clenched teeth, mocking the prayers the high-born cultivators used. "Optimize this."
He slid under the beast's exposed belly, grabbed the protruding end of the tungsten rod, and heaved.
With a wet tear and a spark of severed wires, he ripped the rod sideways. The beast convulsed, its internal fusion battery ruptured. Blue lightning arced from its mouth, frying its organic brain in seconds. It collapsed with a thunderous crash, shaking the mountain of garbage.
Kai lay panting in the muck, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. He waited ten seconds. Twenty. When the beast didn't reboot, he finally exhaled.
He climbed on top of the carcass and used a pry-bar to crack open the beast's chest cavity. Inside, amidst the gore and wires, pulsed a faint, warm light.
A Low-Grade Beast Core. A small, erratic battery of Qi.
It was worth maybe fifty credits. Enough for three days of anti-rejection meds for Rin.
"Got you," Kai whispered, reaching out with trembling fingers.
But as his hand closed around the core, something else caught his eye.
Buried deeper in the beast's gut, lodged against its spine, was a shard. It wasn't like the scrap metal around it. It was a sleek, matte-black rectangle, darker than the shadows, absorbing the dim light of the distant, dying star.
Kai froze. He knew junk. He knew every type of alloy, plastic, and composite produced by the Trinity Corporations. He had never seen material like this. It looked... ancient.
He pried it loose. It was cold to the touch, freezing his skin even through his gloves.
Suddenly, text scrolled across his vision.
Kai stumbled back, panic spiking. Impossible. He had no retinal implants. He had no HUD. He couldn't see digital overlays.
Yet, the words were there, burning in searing crimson directly onto his optic nerves, bypassing the hardware entirely.
[ FATAL ERROR DETECTED ][ SYSTEM INTEGRITY: COMPROMISED ][ DETECTING UNAUTHORIZED HARDWARE... SUBJECT ZERO FOUND. ]
Pain exploded in his head. It felt like someone was driving a heated spike into his temples. Kai fell to his knees, clutching his skull, screaming silently into his rebreather.
[ DOWNLOAD INITIATED: THE ENTROPY SUTRA (VER. 0.0.1) ][ ESTIMATED TIME TO DESTRUCTION OF HOST: 99% ]
"Stop!" Kai gasped, clawing at his own eyes. "Stop it!"
[ WOULD YOU LIKE TO INSTALL? (Y/N) ]
The pain was blinding. He could feel his synapses firing out of rhythm, his very biology being rewritten by code that shouldn't exist. He looked at the black shard in his hand. It was dissolving, turning into black liquid nano-dust that seeped into his pores.
If he passed out here, the toxic atmosphere would kill him in an hour. Or the scavengers would find him and strip him for parts. Rin would die alone, wondering why her big brother never came home.
Rin.
Kai gritted his teeth, blood trickling from his nose. He didn't know what this was. A virus? A curse? A trap?
It didn't matter. In the Junkyard, power was the only currency that didn't devalue.
"Install," he choked out. "Install, damn you!"
The world turned white. And then, for the first time in his life, Kai heard a voice inside his head that wasn't his own. It sounded like a corrupted audio file, static-laced and mocking.
< FINALLY. A USER WITH ROOT ACCESS. >< WAKE UP, GLITCH. WE HAVE A SERVER TO BURN. >