Interlude II: Echoes Before the Storm
By the time dawn spilled across the horizon, the Republic had already felt the ripple.
The incident at Wall Pod, Deep VR Pod 12, once dismissed as a curiosity by a handful of onlookers, had now metastasised into something far more volatile. The House of the Bamboo locked down the expo floor before morning was over. Security teams in black-and-green jackets moved in strict formation through every entrance, their bamboo emblems gleaming with austere authority. What had once been dismissed as a side project or the ambition of an overreaching aunt was now reclassified as a matter of House integrity.
To the Bamboo, the issue was clear: Rob and Sarah Yang had stumbled onto something revolutionary, and now every House would want to claim it. Their old semi-VR prototype had somehow generated neural experiences that exceeded military-grade specifications. Publicly, their voice was calm — ethical oversight, containment, damage control. Yet behind closed doors, the fear was sharper. They didn't understand how their own equipment had been enhanced beyond recognition. The override bore no clear mark, no trace they could explain. It was something alien that had interfaced with their hardware but remained utterly beyond their comprehension.
And now the Bear wanted it.
"Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it."
To the House of the Sky, it was no accident. It was violation.
Accidental or not, the facts were undeniable: a Bamboo-linked simulation had drawn one of their youngest trainees into a full combat reflex. There had been no buffers, no filters, no safeties. The descent into survival was total. And most troubling of all? The system had worked flawlessly. No warnings, no signal, no trace. From the outside, it was ordinary. Only once inside did the override awaken, invisible and absolute.
It was the poison'd chalice — clear to the lips, clean to the taste, yet carrying its ruin inward. And so sealed orders moved through the Sky's hidden veins, silent as jet streams yet bearing the oldest call to arms:
"Cry 'Havoc!' and let slip the dogs of war."
Meanwhile, in the House of the Bear, the storm rose not from without but from within.
There were whispers, not of sabotage from rivals, but of opportunity among their own. The Pod Leasing Subdivision — a sovereign bureau within the Bear's machine — issued formal legal demands to the Bamboo's committee. The language was flawless, surgical, citing violations of sandbox integrity and contamination of leased hardware. On the surface it was routine, a request for technical cooperation. Beneath, it was strategic theft. The Bear wanted the Yang twins' equipment, their code, their breakthrough — and they were willing to use every legal lever to compel compliance.
For to the Bear, this technology represented the next evolution of their Deep VR empire. Whoever controlled memory-level immersion would dominate not just entertainment, but training, therapy, and conditioning itself. They would not allow such power to remain with a medical House when it clearly belonged in the hands of those who understood its true potential.
And so they remembered the old line:
"It is a heretic that makes the fire, not she which burns in't."
Wall Pod itself received no mercy, though it had been merely the unwitting host to the anomaly. By early morning, all forty-eight leased pods on-site had been remotely locked with encrypted kill-switch codes. Interfaces froze without warning. Authentication nodes revoked access in sequence. When Jamie Cash attempted to override the lockdown, he found his administrative privileges had been suspended pending "compliance review." The Bear's message was clear: cooperation with the investigation, or watch your business suffocate under regulatory pressure.
The House of the Dawn moved last.
They neither seized nor accused. They routed memos through civic channels, requesting logs, ensuring visibility, placing every step on record. Their work was not for domestic eyes but for the world beyond. For when crises struck, it was the Dawn's voice that embassies called, regulators awaited, and markets feared to misread. They knew that silence could be mistaken for indifference, and indifference could spark war. And so their conduct was bound by another maxim from the tongue of kings:
"Sweet are the uses of adversity."
The lesser Houses, remembering the last time a pillar had fallen, withdrew to the margins. The House of the River cancelled three major infrastructure bids, citing "regulatory uncertainty." The House of the Mountain suspended mining operations in contested territories. Academic conferences were postponed indefinitely. News outlets shifted coverage to safe ground — weather reports, cultural celebrations, anything that wouldn't require them to take sides in a conflict between titans.
Neutrality became survival. To stand in the path of the Four was to invite ruin. Their silence carried the weight of another line:
"Cowards die many times before their deaths."
And beneath this slow tightening of power, far from the courts and councils, a single man wrestled with a quieter storm.
For the breach had not been born of the Bamboo, nor of any sanctioned hand. It had begun with him and the choices he had not yet made. Christopher Xiong, caught between bloodline and exile, between silence and revelation, now felt the walls of the Republic begin to shift against him. Somehow, every VR system he'd touched had been enhanced beyond recognition, creating experiences that shouldn't exist and drawing the attention of powers he couldn't hope to face alone.
To confess meant revealing his connection to technology that could reshape the balance between Houses — and accepting whatever consequences came with that knowledge. To conceal meant letting the Four Pillars draw blades over shadows he had stirred, watching as political tensions escalated over mysteries only he could explain. Every path was peril. Every silence, a kind of treachery.
The Yang twins were now under Bamboo protection, their equipment seized as "evidence." The Bear was mobilising legal pressure to claim that same equipment as compensation for contaminated hardware. The Sky was treating the incident as an attack on their personnel. And somewhere in the growing storm of House politics, Christopher remained invisible — a cleaning tech caught in the centre of forces he couldn't control.
And so his thoughts turned inward, haunted by the old line spoken in another age:
"To be, or not to be: that is the question."
The storm had not yet broken.
But within him, it already had.