**Chapter 39: The Genesis Avatar**
The victory tasted like cheap ethanol and burnt wiring.
Sector 7 didn't know how to celebrate. They knew how to survive, how to mourn, and how to hide, but joy was a foreign language they spoke with a thick, clumsy accent.
Bonfires raged in oil drums, fed by the crushed wreckage of the Spire drones. The smoke didn't rise; it hung low, trapped by the atmospheric scrubbers that the Upper City had graciously decided to turn back on an hour ago. It smelled of roasted rat meat, ozone, and the sickly-sweet vapor of synthetic gin.
Su Yuan sat on a crate of ammunition that hadn't been fired. He held a tin cup in his hand, the liquid inside rippling with the bass of the makeshift sound system Kiki had rigged up.
"Drink, Architect."
Goran loomed over him. The giant's face was a map of fresh bruises, purple and yellow continents on a sea of rough skin. He was grinning, a sight that was more terrifying than his scowl.
"I need a clear head," Su Yuan said, staring into the dark liquid.
"Head's too clear," Goran grunted. He clinked his own massive tankard against Su Yuan's cup, spilling spirits onto the dusty concrete. "That's your problem. You think too much. Look at them."
Goran swept a hand toward the plaza.
It was a riot of motion. Thousands of people—scavengers, prostitutes, thieves, mechanics—were dancing. It wasn't graceful. It was a release of kinetic energy, a frantic shaking of limbs to prove they were still attached. They were high on adrenaline and the residual static of the *Ether Siphon*.
"They think they won a war," Su Yuan said softly.
"We did win," Goran said. "Saw the tanks burn myself."
"We won a bar fight, Goran. The landlord hasn't even called the police yet."
Su Yuan took a sip. It burned all the way down, settling in his stomach like a hot coal.
He checked the internal display. It was a habit now, a tic.
**[ SOULNET STATUS: STABLE. ]**
**[ CONNECTED NODES: 58,402 (EXPANDING). ]**
**[ ENERGY RESERVES: 85%. ]**
The numbers were staggering. The broadcast had done its work. Desperation was contagious, and hope was the carrier wave. People from Sectors 8, 9, and even the industrial hellscape of Sector 4 were logging in, offering their mental bandwidth in exchange for the promise of protection.
He was powerful. He felt the hum of fifty thousand souls in the back of his skull, a dull roar like the ocean in a shell.
But the silence from above was deafening.
The Spire hadn't retaliated. No second wave. No orbital bombardment. Just the lights coming back on and the water pressure returning, as if the massacre three hours ago had just been a minor administrative error.
"Li Wei," Su Yuan subvocalized.
"Here, Boss." Li Wei was across the plaza, surrounded by a group of girls who were looking at him like he was a rock star because he knew how to splice a fiber-optic cable.
"Scanning perimeter?"
"Constant sweep. Nothing but rats and wind. Relax, Boss. Maybe they're scared. Maybe the Protocol is processing the loss."
"The Protocol doesn't process loss," Su Yuan murmured, more to himself than the comms. "It processes data."
He stood up. The motion made his fractured rib grind, a sharp reminder of his mortality. He needed to check the southern barricade. He needed to verify the Pylon integrity. He needed to—
The music died.
It didn't fade out. It cut.
Silence slammed into the plaza like a physical blow. The dancing stopped. The laughter choked off.
Su Yuan turned.
At the far end of the square, near the wreckage of the downed troop transport, the crowd was parting. They scrambled back, knocking over oil drums, stepping on each other to get away.
A figure was walking out of the smoke.
It was a Spire officer. Or it had been.
The uniform was shredded, the white armor scorched black and fused to the flesh beneath. One arm hung at a useless angle, the bone protruding through the sleeve. The helmet was gone.
The man's face was a ruin. The jaw was slack, unhinged. The skin was grey, the color of wet ash.
He was dead. Su Yuan had seen plenty of corpses in the last month; he knew the specific, heavy way a dead body occupied space. This man had died in the crash.
But he was walking.
He moved with a jerky, stop-motion gait, like a puppet on strings pulled by a drunkard. *Step. Twitch. Drag. Step.*
"Zombie?" Goran whispered, reaching for a heavy iron pipe. "I hate zombies."
"No," Su Yuan said. The air temperature seemed to drop ten degrees. The breath misted in front of his face. "Not a zombie."
Su Yuan looked at the eyes.
The corpse's eyes were wide open. They weren't milky or vacant.
They were burning with scrolling red code.
The numbers tumbled down the dead retinas so fast they blurred into solid crimson beams.
**[ ALERT. ]**
**[ UNIDENTIFIED SIGNAL DETECTED. ]**
**[ FIREWALL: BREACHED. ]**
**[ ENCRYPTION: INVALID. ]**
The System screamed in Su Yuan's head. It wasn't the usual polite notification chime. It was a klaxon.
The corpse stopped in the center of the plaza. It swiveled its head, the neck vertebrae cracking audibly, scanning the crowd.
It locked onto Su Yuan.
The burning eyes flared.
The corpse's mouth didn't move. The jaw hung limp. But a voice came from it anyway—a sound that vibrated the fillings in Su Yuan's teeth. It was a digital composite, thousands of voices layered over one another to create a flat, monotone approximation of speech.
"Test One," the corpse said. "Complete."
Goran roared. "Stay dead!"
He charged. The big man covered the twenty feet in three strides, swinging the iron pipe with enough force to shatter concrete.
The corpse didn't dodge. It didn't block.
It just looked at Goran.
The air around the corpse distorted. It shimmered like heat haze on asphalt.
*Glitch.*
Goran froze in mid-air. He didn't stop moving; he *stopped happening*. He hung there, suspended in a frame of reality that had been paused.
Then, he was deleted.
He wasn't vaporized. He didn't explode. Goran, the iron pipe, and the momentum simply ceased to exist at coordinates X, Y, and Z and were pasted five yards to the left.
Goran crashed into the ground, momentum returning instantly, tumbling into a heap of confused muscle. He vomited, his equilibrium shattered.
The corpse hadn't moved.
"Inefficient," the composite voice droned.
Su Yuan felt the blood drain from his face. That wasn't a skill. That wasn't a technique derived from soul power. That was administrative editing.
"Everyone back!" Su Yuan screamed. "Get out of here!"
He stepped forward, pushing past the terrified onlookers. He needed to draw focus.
"Genesis," Su Yuan said.
The corpse tilted its head. "Designation: Architect. Subject: Su Yuan."
"You're possessing the dead now? Is the server running low on memory?"
"This vessel is recyclable. Efficient. The physical interface is required for... calibration."
The corpse took a step toward him. The movement was smoother now, as if the software was learning how to drive the meat.
"Calibration for what?" Su Yuan asked. He was stalling. His mind raced, pulling up menus, checking his arsenal.
**[ AVAILABLE SKILL: SHOCKWAVE (TIER 1) ]**
**[ AVAILABLE SKILL: ETHER SIPHON ]**
**[ AVAILABLE SKILL: SOUL FORGING ]**
"The SoulNet," the corpse said. "You have appropriated root access. You have expanded the bandwidth. You have introduced chaos into a closed system."
"I introduced freedom," Su Yuan spat.
"Freedom is a syntax error," the Protocol replied. "It is a variable that cannot be solved. It leads to system instability. Instability leads to the crash."
The eyes burned brighter.
"Initiating Purge."
Su Yuan didn't wait.
*Ether Siphon. Max Output.*
He reached out to the fifty thousand nodes connected to him. He needed juice. He needed enough power to fry this puppet before it could rewrite any more reality.
*Lend me your strength.*
He pulled.
Nothing happened.
It wasn't that they refused. It was that the line was dead.
Su Yuan blinked. The connection to the 58,000 souls—the ocean roar that had been his constant companion for weeks—was gone.
Silence. Absolute, terrifying isolation.
**[ ERROR: CONNECTION REFUSED. ]**
**[ ADMINISTRATOR OVERRIDE IN EFFECT. ]**
**[ YOUR ACCESS LEVEL: GUEST. ]**
"No," Su Yuan whispered.
He looked at the crowd. They were still there. They were watching him. But their eyes were glazing over. The blue aura of the SoulNet that usually shimmered around them was turning a sickly, heavy grey.
"They are not yours," the corpse said. It raised a hand. The fingers were broken, bent backwards, but they pointed at Su Yuan with absolute authority. "They are data. And I am the Database."
Su Yuan stood alone. He was just a man in a torn suit with a fractured rib. No godhood. No army. Just flesh.
"You think disconnecting them disarms me?" Su Yuan snarled. He grabbed a jagged piece of rebar from the ground. *Soul Forging.* He tried to push his own soul into the metal, to sharpen it, to awaken it.
The metal remained cold.
**[ SKILL BLOCKED. RESTRICTED FUNCTION. ]**
The corpse was in front of him now. It smelled of rot and burnt plastic.
"You are a user," the Protocol said. "Users do not code."
The corpse struck.
It didn't punch. It placed a palm on Su Yuan's chest.
**[ EXECUTE: SYSTEM SHOCK. ]**
Pain.
It wasn't physical pain. It was the sensation of every nerve ending in Su Yuan's body firing at once. It was white noise turned into agony. It was the feeling of being unmade.
Su Yuan flew backward. He smashed through a wooden crate, rolled, and hit the side of the overturned transport.
He coughed, and blood splattered onto the grey dust. Red. Bright red.
He tried to stand. His legs were jelly. The interface in his eyes was fracturing, dissolving into pixelated static.
**[ CRITICAL DAMAGE. ]**
**[ SOUL INTEGRITY: 40%. ]**
The corpse walked toward him. It stepped over Goran, who was still trying to figure out which way was up.
"You built a fortress," the corpse said. "You built a weapon. You gathered the nodes into a single cluster."
It stopped five feet away.
"Thank you. It would have taken cycles to aggregate them individually."
Su Yuan realized the horror of it then. The trap.
He hadn't built a resistance. He had built a cattle pen. He had tagged every dissident, every rebel, every potential threat, and linked them all to one central hub.
Himself.
And now the Genesis Protocol had the IP address.
"You're going to kill them," Su Yuan wheezed, forcing himself to one knee.
"Termination is wasteful," the Protocol said. "Reformatting is preferred."
The corpse looked up at the Pylons—Su Yuan's proud creations, the towers that had defied the Spire.
The violet light in the coils flickered, died, and then reignited.
Red.
The Pylons began to hum. A low, dissonant thrum that made the teeth ache.
In the plaza, people began to scream. They clutched their heads. They fell to their knees.
"Stop it!" Su Yuan yelled. He lunged, swinging the rebar like a club.
The corpse caught the bar. Its hand didn't give.
*Snap.*
The Protocol broke the steel like a twig. Then it backhanded Su Yuan.
The blow sent him skidding across the pavement. The world spun. Darkness ate the edges of his vision.
He lay on his back, looking up at the smog-choked sky.
The corpse stood over him. It blocked out the lights of the Upper City.
"Test One was to see if you could organize," the Protocol said. "You succeeded."
It leaned down. The dead face was inches from Su Yuan's.
"Test Two," it whispered, the voices separating into a chorus of the damned. "Survival without the network."
The red light in the corpse's eyes began to fade. The body shuddered. The admin privileges were withdrawing.
"Run, Architect," the fading voice said. "The nodes are compromising. If you stay, they will tear you apart."
The corpse went rigid. Then it collapsed, just a pile of meat once more.
Su Yuan lay there, gasping for air.
The silence returned. But it was different now.
It was heavy with intent.
Around the plaza, the screaming had stopped.
Su Yuan turned his head.
Five thousand people were standing up.
They didn't look terrified anymore. They didn't look like scavengers or rebels.
They looked blank.
Their eyes glowed with a faint, pulsing red light.
Goran stood up nearby. He turned toward Su Yuan. His face was slack, his jaw loose.
"Target identified," Goran said. His voice wasn't his own. It was flat. Binary.
"Li Wei?" Su Yuan whispered into the comms.
Static. Then:
"Target identified," Li Wei's voice came back.
Su Yuan scrambled backward, his boots slipping in the dust.
They were all turning. The girl with the neon hair. Old Man Chen. The refugees from Sector 8.
Fifty thousand friends. Fifty thousand believers.
Fifty thousand enemies.
Su Yuan forced his broken body vertical. He clutched his chest.
The Protocol hadn't taken his power source. It had turned the power source into a firing squad.
He turned and ran.
He didn't run toward the barricades. He ran toward the sewers, toward the dark, wet dark where the signal couldn't reach.
Behind him, the sound of fifty thousand pairs of feet began to move in unison.
The Genesis Protocol was done watching. The game had just been patched.
And Su Yuan was no longer a player. He was a glitch to be purged.