**Chapter 44: The Road to the North**
The truck smelled of stale tobacco and old grease, a scent that stuck to the back of Su Yuan's throat like a coating of dust. It was a heavy, armored beast, a converted prisoner transport Li Wei had salvaged from the scrapyard three months ago. The suspension groaned over every pothole, the metal frame rattling a rhythm that felt like teeth chattering in a skull.
Su Yuan gripped the wheel. His knuckles were white, the bandages on his right arm already gray with grime.
He wasn't in Sector 9 anymore.
The city was a smear of neon and smog in the rearview mirror, a glowing sore on the horizon that refused to heal. Out here, in the Dead Zones, there was no neon. There was only the dark, and the road.
The headlights cut two cones of yellow through the blackness. The asphalt was cracked, veins of weeds and grey moss breaking through the surface. Every mile he put between himself and the Spire felt like pulling a hook out of his flesh. The connection to the SoulNet—that constant, buzzing hum of fifty thousand minds—was fading.
It was quiet. Too quiet.
Su Yuan checked the dashboard. A piece of duct tape held a photo of the team—Goran, Li Wei, Old Man Chen—next to the fuel gauge. He looked at it for a second, then forced his eyes back to the road.
He tapped the side of his head.
**[ SIGNAL STRENGTH: 14% ]**
**[ SECTOR 9 NODE: OUT OF RANGE ]**
**[ LOCAL SERVER: NULL ]**
He was off the grid. For the first time since the transmigration, since the nightmare began, the voices were gone. No data streams. No constant updates on the stock market or the riot control patrols. Just the wind whistling through the cracked passenger window and the grind of the engine.
It should have been peaceful. It felt like suffocation.
He reached for the pack of cigarettes on the dash, shook one out, and lit it with the truck's dashboard lighter. The coil glowed orange, smelling of burning dust.
"Just a merchant," he muttered to himself, testing the weight of the lie. "Just Han, selling batteries and copper wire."
He wore a heavy canvas coat, stained with oil, the collar turned up. Underneath, the *Ghost Blade* was strapped to his hip, and Li Wei's prototype rifle sat on the passenger seat, wrapped in a rag. But to the world, he had to be nobody. The Genesis Protocol was watching. If Su Yuan the Architect appeared on a camera feed, the sky would open up.
The road dipped into a valley. Fog rolled in, thick and oily. It didn't move like water; it moved like static, jerking and twitching as it flowed over the hood.
The truck's engine sputtered.
Su Yuan slammed the clutch, downshifting. "Don't you die on me."
The headlights flickered.
Then, he saw it.
Fifty yards ahead, standing in the middle of the road.
It looked like a deer. At first.
Su Yuan slowed, bringing the truck to a crawl.
The thing raised its head. Antlers branched out from its skull, massive and majestic. But as Su Yuan squinted, the image tore. The antlers weren't bone. They were jagged lines of white pixels, stretching too high, clipping through the air itself.
The creature's flank was missing. Not bitten off—unrendered. A square chunk of its torso was just a void of gray checkerboard pattern.
**[ WARNING: CORRUPTED DATA ENTITY DETECTED. ]**
**[ DESIGNATION: GLITCH-BEAST. ]**
**[ THREAT LEVEL: UNSTABLE. ]**
The deer opened its mouth. A sound came out—not a bleat, but a screech of dial-up internet amplified to a scream.
The truck stalled. The electronics died instantly.
"Great," Su Yuan hissed.
He grabbed the rifle. He didn't open the door. He kicked it open.
The cold hit him instantly. It wasn't the winter chill; it was the temperature of a server room, dry and chemically freezing.
The deer-thing twitched. Its head rotated a full hundred and eighty degrees, the neck bones not breaking but simply clipping through each other. It looked at him with eyes that were just glowing blue error messages.
It charged.
It didn't run. It lagged. One moment it was fifty yards away, the next it was twenty, skipping the space in between.
Su Yuan raised the *Soul-Rend Rifle*. It was heavy, unweildy, a mess of pipes and exposed coils. He didn't have the auto-aim assist of the SoulNet. He didn't have the trajectory lines. He just had his eyes and the muscle memory of a man who had spent too long fighting in sewers.
He exhaled. The smoke from his cigarette drifted past the barrel.
He squeezed the trigger.
*Thump.*
No explosion. Just a deep, bass vibration that shook his collarbone. A slug of compressed blue light slammed into the creature's chest.
The impact didn't make a hole. It shattered the code.
The deer exploded into a shower of white polygons. The sound was like breaking glass. The pieces hung in the air for a second, defying gravity, before dissolving into mist.
Su Yuan didn't lower the gun.
To his left, in the ditch. Rustling.
To his right, behind the rusted guardrail. A low growl that sounded like a saw blade cutting bone.
"Pack," he whispered.
Three more shapes pulled themselves out of the fog. These weren't deer. They were wolves, but their jaws were stretched, elongating until they dragged on the asphalt. One of them flickered in and out of existence, blinking like a dying bulb.
Su Yuan backed up, his boots scraping on the gravel. He was alone. No Goran to take the hit. No Li Wei to hack the environment.
The wolf on the left lunged.
Su Yuan didn't shoot. He pivoted, swinging the heavy stock of the rifle.
*Crack.*
He caught the beast in the jaw. It felt like hitting a bag of cement. The wolf spun, its texture map stretching bizarrely, but it didn't fall. It snapped at him, teeth made of jagged white light tearing the sleeve of his coat.
Pain seared his arm—cold, freezing pain, like liquid nitrogen.
Su Yuan grunted, kicking the thing away. He racked the bolt on the rifle.
The second wolf was already in the air.
*Primary Shockwave Fighting Technique.*
He tried to cast it. He threw his left palm forward, willing the force to manifest.
In the city, with the network behind him, this strike would have leveled a building.
Here?
A puff of air. A weak ripple that barely ruffled the wolf's fur.
"Damn bandwidth," Su Yuan snarled.
The wolf slammed into his chest.
He went down hard, the asphalt biting into his back. The rifle skittered away. The beast was on top of him, its weight immense. It didn't smell like wet fur. It smelled like ozone and burning plastic.
The jaws opened, aiming for his throat.
Su Yuan jammed his left forearm into the creature's mouth. The teeth clamped down on the thick canvas and the bandages beneath. The cold burned, spreading up his shoulder.
He reached for his belt with his right hand. The *Ghost Blade*.
He drew the knife. The metal was dull, unassuming.
"Delete this," he spat.
He drove the blade up, under the creature's jaw, into the brainstem.
The wolf froze. It didn't bleed. It vibrated violently, blurring Su Yuan's vision, and then—*pop*.
It vanished.
Su Yuan lay there, chest heaving, covered in a fine layer of grey dust that used to be a digital monster.
He scrambled up. The third wolf was watching him. It tilted its head, the polygon count on its face dropping until it was just a low-res triangle.
It decided the math wasn't in its favor. It turned and bounded into the fog, glitching through a dead tree as it ran.
Su Yuan stood in the middle of the road, shaking. He picked up the rifle. He checked his arm. The coat was shredded, and the skin beneath was red and blistering, covered in a pattern that looked like a QR code branded into the flesh.
"Corruption," he murmured. "Biological overwrite."
He limped back to the truck. He popped the hood, reset the breaker on the battery array, and prayed.
The engine turned over.
He climbed back in, slamming the door. His hands were trembling again. He lit another cigarette, using the ember of the old one.
"Level 2," he said to the dashboard. "Lots of fun."
***
Five hours later, the darkness began to lift. It didn't turn into day; it just turned into a lighter shade of grey.
The terrain had changed. The broken asphalt gave way to hard-packed dirt and salt flats. The temperature gauge on the dash read -10 degrees Celsius.
Ahead, a structure rose out of the gloom.
It wasn't a ruin. It was a fortress of junk.
Shipping containers were stacked three high, welded together and reinforced with sheets of corrugated iron. A perimeter fence made of razor wire and old server racks circled the compound.
A neon sign, missing half its letters, buzzed over the gate: **LAST STOP: TRAN--ISTOR BAR**.
Su Yuan slowed the truck. This was the waypoint. According to the map he'd stolen from the Genesis archives, this was the only settlement before the Ice Shelf.
He stopped at the gate. A turret mounted on top of a container swiveled to track him. It looked like a repurposed gatling gun from a pre-war helicopter.
A loudspeaker crackled.
"Turn around, drifter. We're full. No refugees. No beggars."
Su Yuan rolled down the window. The cold air bit his face.
"I'm not begging," he shouted. "I'm trading."
Silence. The turret hummed.
"What you got?" the voice demanded.
"Fusion cells. Class-A coolant. And uncorrupted peaches."
The turret dipped slightly. The peaches were the clincher.
"Open the gate," the voice barked.
The heavy iron doors ground open. Su Yuan drove into the courtyard. It was packed with vehicles that looked more like Mad Max rejects than cars—buggies with solar panels taped to the hoods, bikes with treads instead of wheels.
People watched him as he climbed out. They were bundled in furs and synthetic rags, goggles covering their eyes to protect against the dust. They looked hard. Worn down.
Su Yuan pulled his collar up. He adopted a stoop, favoring his bad leg. He needed to look harmless. Useful, but harmless.
He walked toward the main structure, the rifle slung over his shoulder in a non-threatening way.
Inside, the bar was warm. It smelled of unwashed bodies and fermented yeast. The lighting was low, provided by strings of LEDs running off a generator that thumped in the basement.
He found a spot at the bar. The bartender was a woman with a cybernetic eye that whirred every time she blinked. She was wiping a glass with a rag that looked dirtier than the floor.
"Peaches," she said. She didn't look at him. She looked at the bag he set on the counter.
"Two cans," Su Yuan said. "For a meal and information."
She stopped wiping. She opened the bag, checked the cans, and nodded. She slid a bowl of brown stew across the counter. It steamed.
"Information is extra," she said. "Depends on what you ask."
Su Yuan took a spoon. He tasted the stew. Rat? Maybe. Protein was protein.
"The North," he said quietly. "The Frozen Wastes."
The noise in the bar didn't stop, but the temperature seemed to drop a few degrees. The man sitting two stools down shifted away.
The bartender looked at him. Her mechanical eye zoomed in, the aperture contracting.
"You got a death wish, Han?" She used the name he'd given at the gate. "Nobody goes past the Shelf."
"Why?"
"Because the machines aren't asleep up there," she whispered, leaning in. "Down here, we get the scraps. The glitches. Up there? That's the cooling unit. That's where the heat goes."
She gestured to the north wall.
"They say there's a hum. A vibration in the ice. You walk on it too long, your heart stops beating and starts syncing with the rhythm. People don't freeze to death. They get overwritten."
Su Yuan ate a spoonful of stew. "I heard there was a signal. A secondary server."
She laughed. It was a dry, cracking sound. "Signal? Sure. Siren song is more like it. We get scavengers coming through here once a month thinking they're gonna find the Golden drive or some nonsense. We sell them gas, we take their money, and we watch them drive out. They never come back."
She tapped the counter.
"Last guy who came back... he was walking. No truck. No clothes. Just walking perfectly straight lines. His eyes were gone. Burned out. He kept saying 'The Architect is weeping' over and over again until his brain melted."
Su Yuan's spoon froze halfway to his mouth.
*The Architect.*
That was him. Or rather, that was the title the Protocol had given him.
"When was this?" Su Yuan asked, keeping his voice steady.
"Three days ago."
Su Yuan felt a chill that had nothing to do with the drafty door. Three days ago was when he dived. When he touched the Entity.
The shockwave hadn't just hit the city. It had traveled the grid. It had reached the frozen north and driven men mad fifty miles away.
"Where is he now?"
"Out back," the bartender jerked a thumb. "Pile of ash. We burned him before the infection spread."
Su Yuan put the spoon down. He wasn't hungry anymore.
He slid another can of peaches across the wood.
"Fill a jerry can with gas," he said. "And tell me the best route through the pass."
The woman looked at the peaches, then at his face. She saw something there that made her decide not to argue.
"High road," she said. "Avoid the valley floor. The data pools there are deep. If you step in, you don't drown, you just stop existing."
"Thanks."
Su Yuan stood up.
"Hey," she called out as he reached the door.
He turned.
"You look like a man running from something," she said.
"Everyone is running from something," Su Yuan replied.
"No," she shook her head. Her mechanical eye spun. "You look like you're running *to* it. That's worse."
***
The high road was treacherous. It was a narrow shelf of rock carved into the side of the mountain, barely wide enough for the truck's tires.
To his left, the cliff wall rose sheer and black. To his right, a drop of a thousand feet into a valley shrouded in purple mist.
The bartender was right. The pools down there were glowing. Massive lakes of liquid data, swirling with unformed code. It was beautiful and horrific. If he fell, he wouldn't hit the ground; he would fall into the raw source code of the world.
Night was falling again.
Su Yuan parked the truck in a small alcove protected from the wind. He killed the engine to save fuel.
He sat in the dark cab. The silence was absolute here.
He pulled the internal comms unit from his pocket—a modified earpiece Li Wei had built.
"Li Wei," he whispered. "Do you read?"
Static.
"Goran?"
White noise.
He was alone.
He leaned his head back against the seat. He closed his eyes.
He thought of the clone. The AI he had left behind in Sector 9 to mimic him, to keep morale up.
Does the clone sleep? Does it dream? Does it feel the phantom pain in its ribs?
"I'm sorry," he whispered to the dark. He wasn't sure who he was apologizing to. The clone? Li Wei? Or the 58,000 souls he had used as a battering ram.
He slept in shifts. Twenty minutes of sleep, ten minutes of watching the radar.
Morning came with a blinding white light.
Su Yuan stepped out of the truck. He walked to the edge of the cliff.
He had reached the summit of the pass.
Below him, stretching to the horizon, was the North.
It wasn't snow.
The ground was white, but it was a matte, plastic white. The mountains were perfect geometric pyramids. The trees were fractals, repeating patterns of crystal that chimed in the wind.
It was a render that hadn't finished texturing.
And in the center of the vast white waste, twenty miles out, was a black spire. Not like the one in the city. This one was broken, jagged, like a spear thrust into the earth.
A beam of red light pulsed from its tip, shooting straight up into the static sky.
Su Yuan raised his binoculars.
At the base of the spire, he saw movement.
Not wolves. Not deer.
Machines. Massive, crab-like constructs patrolling the perimeter. And something else.
Figures. Humanoid. Walking in perfect unison.
He adjusted the focus.
They were wearing the grey jumpsuits of the Sector 7 laborers. But their faces were covered in chrome masks.
"Slaves," Su Yuan breathed.
He lowered the binoculars. The cold wind bit at his exposed skin, but the heat coming off the distant spire rippled the air.
This wasn't just a server node. It was a factory.
The Genesis Protocol wasn't just trapping souls. It was building bodies.
Su Yuan went back to the truck. He checked the rifle. He checked the knife.
He looked at the photo duct-taped to the dash one last time.
"Hold the line, Li Wei," he whispered.
He put the truck in gear. The tires crunched over the white, synthetic earth.
The road down was steep. There were no guardrails.
Su Yuan didn't touch the brake.