The nutrient paste sat heavy and cold in Kai's stomach, a dense lump of calories that his body was already burning through just to keep his heart beating.
He sat cross-legged on the metal floor of Container 1408. The only light came from the flickering LED strip overhead and the faint, rhythmic glow of the heater in the corner. The air was stale, recycled too many times, carrying the metallic taste of the Stack.
"Close your eyes," Kai whispered to himself, repeating Cipher's instruction. "Visualize the network."
It sounded like the superstitious nonsense the street shamans peddled in the Sump—visualize your chi, open your meridians. But Kai knew this was different. This wasn't magic; it was architecture.
He shut his eyes.
Usually, darkness was just the absence of light. But now, as the Entropy Sutra hummed in his blood, darkness was a canvas.
Slowly, lines of code began to scroll across the blackness of his mind. They were green and jagged, like the heart rate monitor of a dying man.
< INITIALIZING DAEMON PROCESS... >< SCANNING LOCAL NETWORK... >< ERROR: NO NEURAL INTERFACE DETECTED. >< REROUTING THROUGH BIOLOGICAL NERVOUS SYSTEM. >
Pain sparked at the base of his skull. It felt like a needle being driven into his brain stem. Kai gritted his teeth, his hands gripping his knees so hard his knuckles turned white. This was the "sideload"—forcing software to run on hardware that wasn't compatible.
< FOCUS, GLITCH. > Cipher's voice was a vibration in his jawbone. < YOU ARE NOT A USER. YOU ARE A SERVER. YOUR BODY IS THE HARDWARE. YOUR WILL IS THE OS. FIND THE ROOT DIRECTORY. >
Kai focused on his breathing. In. Out.
With every breath, he imagined pulling the static electricity from the air into his lungs.
In his mind's eye, he saw it.
It wasn't a ball of golden light like in the old legends. It was a swirling, chaotic vortex of data located in his solar plexus—his Dantian. But it was gray, dormant, and locked behind a heavy, rusted gate.
[ SYSTEM STATUS: OFFLINE ][ DANTIAN: LOCKED ][ REQUIRED PERMISSIONS: ADMIN ]
"I don't have Admin access," Kai thought, frustration bubbling up.
< YOU DON'T ASK FOR ACCESS. YOU CRACK IT. >
Kai mentally reached out to the vortex. He didn't try to push the gate open. Instead, he looked at the structure of it. He looked for the flaws.
[ OBJECT: BIOLOGICAL LIMITER ][ ENCRYPTION: GENETIC LOCK (TIER 1) ][ VULNERABILITY DETECTED: THERMAL STRESS ]
Thermal stress.
Kai understood. He didn't need to be stronger than the lock; he just needed to overheat the system until it crashed.
He engaged the Entropy Sutra. It wasn't a chant; it was a command line execution. He visualized the energy around him—the heat from the heater, the electricity in the wires, the residual radiation in the metal walls—and he pulled.
Outside of Kai's mind, the room began to react.
At first, it was subtle. The hum of the electric heater stuttered, dropping a pitch. The LED strip on the ceiling dimmed, then flared brighter, pulsing in time with Kai's breathing.
Thrum. Flash. Thrum. Flash.
Dust motes dancing in the air stopped moving randomly. They aligned, swirling around Kai in a tight, unnatural orbit.
Rin, sleeping heavily on the cot, whimpered in her sleep. Her mechanical arm, usually erratic and twitchy, suddenly went rigid. The LEDs on the prosthetic flickered from green to amber.
Kai couldn't see any of this. He was drowning in the sensation of heat.
It felt like he had swallowed a live coal. The energy he was pulling from the environment rushed into his body, not through a neat neural port, but through every pore of his skin. It was dirty energy—unfiltered, mixed with the static of the Stack and the pollution of the air.
< MORE. > Cipher urged. < THE FIREWALL IS THICK. YOU NEED MORE BANDWIDTH. >
Kai gasped, his back arching. The veins in his neck bulged, turning a dark, bruised purple.
He expanded his reach. He pulled harder.
Zap.
A spark of blue electricity jumped from the exposed wiring in the wall, arcing through the air to strike Kai's shoulder. It didn't burn him; it absorbed into him.
The heater in the corner groaned. The metal casing began to frost over. Kai was draining the thermal energy directly from the coils, inverting its function.
[ WARNING: LOCAL POWER GRID UNSTABLE ][ HARVESTING: 12% EFFICIENCY ]
The phenomenon spread outward.
In the narrow metal hallway outside Container 1408, the overhead lights began to strobe violently. Sparks showered down from a junction box.
"Hey!" A voice shouted from the neighboring container. "Who's running a welder at this hour? My screen just died!"
"Power's browning out!" another voice yelled. "Someone's stealing the juice!"
Inside 1408, Kai was oblivious to the commotion. He was burning up from the inside out.
The gray vortex in his Dantian was spinning now, faster and faster. The rusted gate—the genetic lock that marked him as a Null—was glowing cherry-red.
< PRESSURE IS BUILDING. > Cipher's voice was excited, bordering on manic. < DO NOT VENT IT. COMPRESS IT. OVERCLOCK YOUR HEART. >
Kai felt his heart rate spike. 120. 150. 180 BPM.
It felt like his chest was going to explode. The pain was excruciating, a tearing sensation deep in his gut. He was trying to force a river through a straw.
"I... can't..." Kai gritted his teeth, blood leaking from his nose.
< YOU CAN. OR YOU CAN DIE. CHOOSE. >
Kai thought of Kray. He thought of the Inquisitor on the ladder. He thought of Rin, dying by inches on that bed.
He didn't want to be a glitch anymore. He wanted to be the crash.
He screamed—a soundless, internal roar—and threw everything he had at the gate.
The heater in the corner exploded. The glass heating element shattered, spraying shards across the floor.
The LED strip overhead burst, plunging the room into darkness.
But it wasn't dark.
Kai was glowing.
Faint, geometric lines of red light were tracing themselves across his skin, following the pathways of his nervous system. They looked like circuit traces on a motherboard.
The energy from the room—the heat, the light, the electricity—swirled into him, a funnel of visible distortion.
In his mind, the red text hovering over the gate changed.
[ VULNERABILITY EXPLOITED. ][ EXECUTING: BRUTE FORCE ATTACK. ]
CRACK.
The sound came from inside Kai's body. It sounded like a dry branch snapping.
The rusted gate in his mind shattered.
The gray vortex exploded, flooding his body with a torrent of cold, heavy power. It wasn't the warm, gentle Qi described in the ancient texts of the Pure-Bloods. It was icy, sharp, and dense. It felt like liquid mercury rushing through his veins.
The sensation of heat vanished instantly, replaced by a profound, numbing chill.
Kai slumped forward, catching himself with his hands. He vomited.
A thick, black sludge expelled from his mouth, splattering onto the metal floor. It smelled acrid, like burnt rubber and bile.
< SYSTEM UPDATE COMPLETE. >< CACHE CLEARED. >< CONGRATULATIONS, HOST. YOU ARE NO LONGER A NULL. >
Kai wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He was panting, but the air felt different now. It felt... thinner. He could breathe deeper. The constant, low-level ache in his joints that he had lived with for years was gone.
He slowly opened his eyes.
The room was pitch black, save for the faint light leaking from under the door. But to Kai, it wasn't dark.
He could see the heat signature of Rin on the bed, a soft orange glow. He could see the residual electricity fading in the broken light fixture, a dying blue web.
He looked at his own hands. The red circuit-lines on his skin faded, sinking beneath the surface, but he could feel them there, humming.
Text scrolled rapidly across his vision, crisp and clear.
[ CULTIVATION BASE ESTABLISHED ][ STAGE: HARDWARE FORGE (BIT 1) ][ STATS UPDATED: ][ > STRENGTH: 1.2 (+0.4) ][ > AGILITY: 1.4 (+0.3) ][ > INTEGRITY: 100% ][ > QI RESERVES: 15/100 ]
"Hardware Forge," Kai whispered. The first step.
He stood up. His movements were fluid, silent. The leaden weight that had dragged him down since birth was gone. He felt light, dangerous.
He walked to the broken heater. He touched the metal casing. It was freezing cold, drained of every joule of energy.
"Did I do that?"
< WE DID THAT. > Cipher corrected. < ENTROPY. WE MOVE ENERGY FROM ORDER TO CHAOS, AND WE TAKE A CUT OFF THE TOP. YOU DRAINED THE GRID FOR THIS ENTIRE BLOCK FOR 3.4 SECONDS. >
Kai looked at the door. He could hear voices outside—angry, confused voices. The neighbors were resetting their breakers, banging on fuse boxes.
"They'll know," Kai said.
< THEY'LL SUSPECT A SURGE. THE INFRASTRUCTURE HERE IS GARBAGE. NO ONE WILL TRACE IT TO A SPECIFIC UNIT. UNLESS YOU DO IT AGAIN. >
Kai nodded. He turned to Rin.
She was still sleeping, but her breathing was deeper, more rhythmic. The red, angry inflammation around her prosthetic port had receded slightly. The medicine was working, but Kai knew Cipher was right. It was a patch, not a fix.
He needed more.
The hunger returned then, sudden and violent. It wasn't just a need for food; it was a craving for data, for energy. His body had been upgraded, but now it had higher running costs.
He walked to the small sink in the corner and washed the black sludge from his face. He looked into the cracked mirror glued to the wall.
His eyes, usually a dull brown, now had a faint, almost imperceptible ring of red around the pupils. And deep within them, if you looked closely, you could see streams of data scrolling by.
He wasn't just Kai anymore. He was Subject Zero. The Glitch.
He clenched his fist, feeling the newfound strength in his tendons. The tungsten rod lay on the floor where he had dropped it. He picked it up. It felt lighter now. Balanced.
[ OBJECT: TUNGSTEN ROD ][ STATUS: CRUDE WEAPON ][ POTENTIAL UPGRADE DETECTED: CONDUCTIVE FILAMENT WRAP ]
"Upgrade," Kai murmured.
He looked around the room with new eyes. The pile of scrap in the corner wasn't just trash anymore. It was resources.
He picked up a coil of copper wire and a stripped battery pack from a dead drone.
[ CRAFTING SUB-ROUTINE AVAILABLE. ]
Kai sat back down on the floor. He wasn't going back to sleep. The Vipers would return, eventually. The Firewall was out there.
He had to be ready.
He took the tungsten rod and the wire. His hands moved with a dexterity he had never possessed before, stripping the wire, winding it tightly around the grip and the tip of the rod. He connected the battery pack to the base, splicing the leads with his fingernails.
It was crude. Ugly.
But when he gripped it, a circuit completed. He channeled a tiny fraction of his new Qi—his Code—into the weapon.
Hummm.
The tungsten rod vibrated. The copper wire glowed a dull, menacing orange.
[ WEAPON CRAFTED: SHOCK-BATON (JURY-RIGGED) ][ DAMAGE: PHYSICAL + ELECTRICAL ][ DURABILITY: LOW ]
Kai powered it down. A grim smile touched his lips.
The sun would be coming up in a few hours. The smog would turn from black to gray. And Kai had work to do.
He needed to find out who the "Root Administrator" was. He needed to find out why he was a Null.
But first, he needed breakfast.