The Antarctic wind felt like it had been flash-frozen first, then shoved across the ice sheet by brute force.
It wasn't just "cold." It was a low-frequency, mineral-dust, salt-tinged stream of air that screamed over the white plateau south of Zhongshan Station and left a layer of glassy frost on every exposed piece of metal.
"The signal's still dropping."
Captain Shen Pei, leader of the Dragon Republic's Fifth Polar Archaeology & Survey Team, was crouched by an instrument crate, knuckles white inside her gloves. Her back was thin but wiry, the kind of hard you only got from standing in wind like this for months.
"Down from minus eighty-two to minus ninety-six dBm," said Dong, the tech, squinting at his tablet. His eyelashes were frosted together. "Drop another three to five and it'll sink into the noise floor, Captain."
"It shouldn't be fading this fast." Shen glanced west-south toward the ice sheet. There was nothing. Just the distant hump of the ice dome like a frozen camel's back. "Log it. UTC+0, 05:33. One thousand one hundred forty kilometers east of the South Pole. Signal amplitude, second decay."
Her earpiece crackled. The line from Longdu Coordination Center came through with a half-second delay.
"Fifth Archaeology Team, confirm: do you still have the signal? Repeat, do you still have the signal?"
"Still have it," Shen replied, tapping the mic on her chest. "But it's about to drown."
"Copy… Maintain full monitoring. Topside's directive is clear: we must lock the source coordinates in this pass."
"Tell 'topside' this," Shen said slowly, clearly. "We are on an ice cap, not on the Daxing'an Range firing seismic shots. Under us is three thousand meters of ice, plus bedrock, paleo-glacial slip layers, and uncharted voids. This signal source is not a 'one ping and done' problem."
The line went quiet, as if someone on the other end was rushing to translate that into briefing-room language.
Then a new voice came on—older, flatter, with the bureaucratic calm that usually meant someone above my pay grade is listening.
"Captain Shen. Central Command has just updated your intel package. The Rus Federation's 'North Drill–II' project resumed deep drilling last night. They're boring down from their old ultra-deep shaft in the Arctic. In terms of geometry, its axis lines up almost straight through the Earth with your current signal source."
Shen's brows knitted under her hood. "That old Arctic money-pit?"
"Yes. So we need today's full dataset ASAP. The analysts are building a 'bi-polar convergent signal' model."
The wind snatched half the words away, but she'd already caught the key point.
North Pole and South Pole.
Something screaming from both ends of the planet, at the same time.
"Run the procedure," she said.
They hauled a squat disk—already preheated for six hours to match outside temperature—from the shelter out onto the snow. From above it was just a darker circle on white, ringed with four stubby antenna masts. It didn't look like cutting-edge anything.
The real hardware was underneath.
A two-meter borehole they'd melted into the ice dropped thirty-plus meters down. Hanging inside was a pencil-thin "listening needle" descending into the third ice layer of the Antarctic cap—the stress layer that carried vibrations furthest.
Dong plugged in the data cable. The flatline on his screen jumped like something had yanked it.
"Back up to minus eighty-five!" Dong's voice shook. "We've got pullback!"
"Record the waveform. Spin up secondary analysis," Shen ordered. "And bundle the raw spectrum, priority line to Longdu."
"On it."
The display filled with a jagged mess of lines: a shivering blue baseline under a smudged green haze of noise. Above that, in one narrow band, a thin dirty red trace flickered in and out. Every time it appeared, it slid a little to the right—testing frequencies, like a hand patting the radio dial.
"It's auto-tuning itself?" Dong whispered. "That's not possible, the source isn't on our—"
"Who said it's impossible?" another team member snorted. "How do you know there's not something smart down there?"
They laughed, and the wind sheared their laughter apart.
Only Shen didn't laugh.
She stared at that red line until her eyes burned. In the back of her mind, a three-month-old image replayed itself: the first time they'd seen this "deep polar signal." Back then it had been just a blip—a one-second twitch of red on a geomagnetic spectrogram. The moment it appeared, the state slapped a "Revelation-Class Relic (Suspected)" tag on it and dumped it on their Fifth Joint Team.
They called it "archaeology," but nobody knew if there was actually anything ancient down there.
They called it a "relic," but nobody had seen so much as a pebble.
"Captain Shen!" The coordination center suddenly sounded excited. "We've just intercepted a leaked data burst from Rus 'North Drill–II'! Confirmed—deep magnetic vibrations on their Arctic shaft match your signal. Overlap above fifty percent!"
Fifty percent overlap meant this wasn't random noise.
Whatever was speaking, it was speaking from deep under both poles.
It was also adjusting itself to be heard.
So either there was some insane, planet-sized structure talking through the poles, or—
"Or the signal's not coming from the Earth at all," Shen muttered, "but being fired into it."
"What was that, Captain?" the Longdu operator asked.
"I said we'll continue monitoring," she replied. She did not repeat that guess. It sounded too much like something from a cheap sci-fi paperback, not something you wrote into a classified field report.
She dutifully logged the weather, coordinates, wind speed, ice temperature.
Only then did she look back up at the blank white horizon.
She had an abrupt, razor-clear premonition:
After today, the world wouldn't go back to normal.
On the other side of the planet, above the Arctic Circle, a drilling rig stabbed up out of the permafrost like an old-world lance.
The tower of North Drill–II still carried the brutalist lines of a Soviet-era design. On the outside, at least. Inside, all the organs were new: high-durability drill strings, smart mud systems, harmonic-assisted impact assemblies, and—freshly detached from the defense ministry—one "Deep Environment Anomaly Listening Module."
In the control room, Colonel Semyonov rode the elevator down, tea in hand. Numbers flicked past on the walls: –1000m, –2000m, –8000m—old well log playback. The new bit had only chewed through the permafrost and was just starting on the ancient rock, depth a modest three thousand-something.
But Semyonov was already staring at data from eight thousand and below.
"Report," he said. His breath steamed. His face did not.
"We've picked up a deep magnetic pulse with no geologic signature." The young engineer shoved his glasses up. "Not from the bit, not from the pumps, not from any of our equipment."
"Estimated depth?" Semyonov asked.
"Beneath ten thousand meters."
Semyonov's brows rose. "That's beyond this well's designed reach."
"Yes. But the pulse is tuning up toward us." The engineer lowered his voice. "And… Moscow Info-Ops just confirmed that the Dragon Republic's South Pole team is hearing the same thing."
"They are too?" Semyonov snorted. "For once, we're not chasing their tail."
He stepped closer to the big screen.
The red line there beat like the ECG of some cold-blooded beast.
"Open it up," he said.
"Sir, the spectrum is dirty. We don't have—"
"Open."
The engineer grit his teeth and did as told. The display flooded with math monsters: Fourier transforms, envelope analyses, AI-predicted source waveforms.
Every model converged on two characters: "Earth".
The summary was almost insulting in its simplicity:
This thing knows you are listening.
It is cooperating so you can hear it better.
Silence fell over the room.
"Feels like," Semyonov said at last, "someone's reading names off a list. And we just heard ours."
No one responded.
"Keep drilling," he snapped. "No stopping. Not today."
Outside, snow hammered the observation windows in dull thuds, like a second heart keeping time with the one under Antarctica.
Ten thousand kilometers south, Nanzhou City was sweating under a late-October rain.
At 1:30 a.m., the ring road skirting an old urban village in Baiyun District glistened with streetlamp reflections. Rain poured off the elevated highway, slid down the concrete pylons in sheets like rotten curtains.
A guy was running through it.
Strictly speaking, he was running for his life.
He had a cheap black briefcase in one hand—the shoulder strap had snapped, so now he just hauled it. His sneakers were peeling at the soles. His T-shirt and jacket clung to him, rainwater funneling down his chin into his collar.
Three men were chasing him.
"Meathead! Stop running!" the bald one in front yelled, his Mandarin muddied with Cantonese and Hunan. "You think you can outrun us, you deserve to live!"
The guy didn't look back. He did yell, though.
"If I could run slower, I wouldn't be me!"
His legal name was Mingzhou, born 1999. No one who knew him used it.
Since middle school, everyone called him—"Meathead." It started because his head looked oversized on his skinny frame. It stuck because his brain was always full of half-baked schemes, like a messy "pig-head." Later, the nickname evolved into a role: whenever someone needed a mascot, a scapegoat, or a guy to stand there and "look important," people would say—
"Send Meathead."
Tonight, he was finally living up to the "head" part.
And also finally finding out what "mascot" meant when the stakes were civilization-level.
He hadn't thought it was a big deal when he took this job.
"Data cleaning and hardware recovery," the guy had said. "You wipe the phones, strip usable chips, sell scrap. Easy money."
Turned out the client's idea of "scrap" included a military experimental board that was never supposed to hit the civilian market.
The board's ports were wrong. The little blue-blinking chip soldered at the center was especially wrong—its light pulsed with a disturbing, almost cardiac rhythm.
"This legit?" Zhu had asked.
"Legit as hell. Don't ask," the guy snapped. "Just deliver it to a warehouse in Baiyun tonight. Someone picks it up tomorrow. You get paid."
He'd barely walked out of the metro when three men appeared.
They didn't talk. They just reached for him.
Zhu had been the middleman on a dozen gray-area jobs. He knew one thing:
If something is truly dirty, you only find out after it explodes in your face.
So he ran.
He didn't get far. His stamina was… average, on a good day.
By the time he ducked under the overpass and into a side alley, his lungs felt stuffed with warm, wet towels.
He turned, hoping the alley cut through to the next street.
It dead-ended in a moldy brick wall.
"Shit…"
He whirled back.
The three men had already fanned out at the mouth of the alley. The rain behind them made a shining curtain.
"Enough." The bald leader held out a hand. "Don't make this sad. If you took the wrong package, say so. Everyone takes the wrong delivery sometimes. Hand it over, we'll pretend the rain was too heavy to see your face."
"I have no idea what you're talking ab—"
As he said it, Zhu's hand slipped behind his back into the briefcase.
Besides the military board, the bag contained the usual clutter from his day job.
He was a freelance video editor, the kind who cut promotional clips for second-tier cities, wedding reels, high school application portfolios, and the occasional foreign-language KOL. His bag always had a portable hard drive, cables, a focus chart—
And a tiny, useless toy from three years ago: a handheld quantum signal scanner he'd picked up in Longqiang North electronics market.
"Ex-military surplus, good prop for hacker videos," his boss had said.
He had used it as a prop.
His fingers brushed its hard plastic shell now.
Cornered men rely on instinct, not reason. Zhu's instinct said: pick something that lights up and beeps. Maybe you can bluff.
"Hey, don't—" the bald man started.
Too late.
Zhu yanked the scanner out, didn't even think about whether it had battery, and twisted the power ring.
The world changed.
Not in the sense that the ground shook or the sky split.
More like someone plucked reality like a guitar string.
A bass note thrummed through Nanzhou's damp air, impossibly low. Not quite sound, not quite vibration, like the echo of whales singing under an ancient sea.
It did not come from the scanner.
The scanner had locked onto something, and that something had been yanked into the open.
Zhu's ears prickled, like a bug crawled into his ear canal. A pressure pushed against his chest. The colors at the edge of his vision washed out. Not to black, but to a dull, wet postcard of gray-blue-white. Late-night Nanzhou rain got desaturated.
Across from him, the three thugs' faces went equally pale.
"Wh—" the bald guy started.
His lips moved, but no sound came out.
The rain had stopped making noise.
Sound was just… muted.
The only thing alive in the alley was the scanner in Zhu's hand. Its screen flicked to life, text streaming by in a language that wasn't English or Chinese or anything he recognized.
It looked more like some language building itself.
[ …CIV-ENROLL-CHANNEL… ]
[ …LOCAL-NODE… ]
[ …SIGNAL-RESPONSE… ]
[ …KEY?… ]
Four people, one alley; ten eyes stared.
Three seconds passed. Four.
Then the scanner clicked, like someone far away had hit a physical switch.
The screen flipped to a very human, very friendly window:
Unregistered Civilization Node Detected
Initiate Civilization Registration?
[ YES ] [ NO ]
It was so stupidly simple that Zhu wanted to laugh.
He didn't.
The alley was too quiet. Too wrong.
His first sober instinct was to hit NO.
Who randomly registers "civilizations"? Scam? Virus? Brain hack?
Then his brain caught up with his hand: this scanner wasn't connected to anything. His phone was zipped in a side pocket, airplane mode, no hotspot.
This interface wasn't coming from a cell tower, a router, or the internet.
It was coming from the same direction as the polar signal.
This wasn't some teenage hacker's prank.
This was the thing below the ice, saying hello.
There was a window—a gap in which reality had paused to see what Zhu would do.
He should have refused. He knew that, somewhere beneath the rushing panic.
He didn't.
He hit YES.
"Don't you—!" the bald guy lunged.
Too late.
The scanner flared, bright as a pocket-sized sun. A thin sheet of pale gold light spilled out like an unfurling scroll, stretched, and snapped over the entire alley.
Zhu, three thugs, the rain—everything was inside a "civilization-grade registration field."
At that very moment, three different control rooms across the planet glitched.
On the Antarctic ice, Shen Pei's red trace turned thick and sharp. Her spectrum display spat out English-Chinese mixed text:
Local Planetary Civilization Node: EARTH-LOCAL
Node Count: 1/1 – Registered
Random Beacon: Generated
Beacon ID: ZHU-HEAD-1
In the Arctic, the North Drill–II display did something similar in Russian and Chinese:
Local Earth Node: Registered
Flag Beacon: ZHU-HEAD-1
Colonel Semyonov stared at the name and swore.
"Who the hell is 'ZHU-HEAD'?!"
Meanwhile, in the alley, the golden field hummed with a barely audible tuk-tuk-tuk, like a gentle heartbeat or someone tapping on a keyboard.
Lines poured down the light in front of Zhu's eyes:
Civilization self-designation detected: EARTH / 地球
System Recognition: EARTH-LOCAL
Stage: Planetary Mid-Phase / Single-Star Dependent / Singular Consciousness Dominant / Multi-Faction Fragmented
Combat Rating: 0.27 (Low)
Recommendation: Place in "The Crucible" – Newbie Tier.
"Combat rating zero point two seven?" Zhu twitched. "Who're you calling weak?"
The text didn't care.
More lines unscrolled:
Multiple internal languages and power structures detected.
Enable "Full Population Uplink as Civilization Nodes"?
[ YES ] [ NO ]
Translated: do you want to plug all humans into this system?
His gut said: NO.
No sane person would tag the entire species into a completely unknown network.
He glanced up.
The three men were staring at the golden interface. They couldn't read it, but they could see the scanner doing something it had no business doing. Their faces had gone from greedy to murderous.
"Give me that," the bald one snarled, starting forward.
The other two flanked him.
Zhu's hindbrain did the math.
If he handed it over, he was dead.
If he didn't, he was dead.
If he hit YES again… he had no idea.
He hit YES.
This time, the reaction wasn't limited to a single alley.
Something vast and invisible brushed across the planet—a fingertip passing gently over a globe.
Every piece of hardware that could receive, shape, or echo electromagnetic fields got a tap.
It wasn't a hack, not in any way Earth's networks understood. It was more like someone had pressed the "Identity Register" button on the entire world.
In a São Paulo internet café, a kid in a hoodie was booted out of his match. His screen stopped mid-frame, then filled with letters he didn't know and one word he did: "Brazil."
Near the Horn of Africa, on a UN peacekeeper convoy, the battle-net display in their mobile command truck flashed:
Detected: Earth-Local Civilization
On a Thai island, a forty-five-year-old man fresh off a 30-kilometer ride set his Decathlon bike aside and picked up his tablet to look up a dinner recipe.
The interface changed before he touched it.
All across the planet, wherever there was a powered screen or implant, people saw the same thing in their own language:
"Earth Civilization, welcome to The Crucible."
"Your civilization registration has been confirmed by Random Beacon 'Meathead.'"
Around the world, curses flew.
"Who?!"
"Zhu…Head?!"
"What department is that?!"
"Who the hell decided this for us?!"
Military and intelligence centers in every major capital spun up in seconds, chasing the same question:
Who is Meathead?
In the alley, the golden light peeled back like someone lifting a lid. Sound screamed back in; rain hammered the pavement again.
The scanner's main UI was gone. In one corner, a stripped-down status block remained:
Beacon: ZHU-HEAD-1
Role: Local Civilization Registrar
Authority: Minimal
Suggestion: Approach any "Crucible Entry" to complete initialization.
The bald man stared at Zhu like he was a bomb.
"You…you just… you just sold all of us out, didn't you?"
"I don't even know what I did!" Zhu protested. "I thought it was an ad!"
The punch came without warning.
His brain registered the fist, the distance, the angle.
He had no time to dodge.
The scanner beeped once.
Beacon Holder in Immediate Danger.
Enable "Minimum Protection Protocol"?
[ YES ]
There was no NO this time.
The fist stopped centimeters from Zhu's nose, like it had hit a transparent wall. Force rebounded. The bald man's own momentum hurled him backward into the alley wall. He slid down, clutching his arm and swearing.
"What the hell did you install?!" he wheezed. "You got cheats?!"
"I didn't install anything!" Zhu was close to hysterical. "I just pressed YES!"
The other two men looked at each other.
For the first time that night, real fear showed on their faces.
This drenched, broke video editor was suddenly way above their pay grade.
"If we touch him again," the one in camouflage muttered, "and some 'global security' thing pings our names… Forget it. Fall back."
They dragged the bald man away.
At the mouth of the alley, the boss threw one last venomous look over his shoulder: We'll remember you.
Zhu sagged against the wall and slid down into a puddle.
Rainwater plastered his hair to his forehead.
He looked at the scanner.
It lit up again.
Crucible Notice: "Old God Fragment (Incomplete)" Activated.
Unknown era consciousness residue detected within host.
Fragment Type: Observational Key from Crucible Makers.
Status: Semi-Dormant.
Allow short-term interface between Fragment and Crucible Main System?
Warning: This will greatly increase your chance of being noticed by high-tier civilizations.
[ ALLOW ] [ DECLINE ]
His thumb moved toward DECLINE on reflex.
New text popped up under the buttons:
You completed civilization registration without protection.
System assumes your consent.
Both buttons greyed out.
"You've gotta be kidding me," Zhu whispered. "You're using dark-pattern UI on me at a civilization level?"
Something burst open in his head.
Not pain—more like an overstuffed door kicking inward.
For a heartbeat he was no longer crouched in an alley in Nanzhou but standing in places that had never been mapped.
A black obsidian plain under a sky of stars, ringed with colossal hoops like titanic furnaces. Inside each ring swirled impossible energies and the flickers of civilizations fighting, breeding, burning, transcending.
A city-sized structure drifted silently through interstellar dust, its architecture turned inside-out, wrapped in a shell like armor.
A figure clad in light bent down toward something very small—that something felt like him—and said, in a sound that was not a sound:
"Residual Observer, wake."
He understood the meaning, though it wasn't in any human language.
The understanding made his stomach lurch.
He threw up, violently, sour bile and half-digested street food splattering across the puddles. Rain diluted it quickly, washing it down the cracked concrete to the storm drain.
Far away, printers in a secure Longdu facility spat paper with insane speed.
"Confirm beacon ID: 'Meathead,'" someone shouted over the hum. "We've got our first text return!"
On the Antarctic plateau, Shen Pei listened to Longdu's frantic chatter and stared at the endless white.
The world was playing a very specific joke:
Dozens of nations, generations of scientists, whole fleets of satellites.
And in the end, the one who hit the "Register Civilization" button for Earth
—did it in a back alley in Nanzhou,
with a second-hand scanner,
while running from three low-level muscle for a botched gray-market delivery.
"Lock him," she told Longdu.
"We are," the operator replied. Keys clacked over the shared channel. "But be ready—"
"For what?"
"For the fact that the whole planet is trying to lock him too."
By the time Zhu spat the last of the bile out of his mouth, his phone had nearly vibrated itself to death in his pocket.
Group chats were exploding.
"Did your phone flicker just now?"
"Wtf is 'The Crucible'??"
"It says some 'Meathead' registered us, is that for real???"
"@ZhuMingzhou is that you or another Meathead???"
Short-video feeds were already full of people in pajamas shrieking at their cameras.
"Which clown represented Earth, huh? Get out here, I'll buy you milk tea—after I kill you."
Trending topics:
#EarthCivilizationRegistered
#RandomBeaconZhuHead
#CrucibleSystemHackOrInvasion
And roughly a million variations on "Who the hell is Meathead?"
He stared at the screen until a new call pushed through everything else.
Unknown number, flagged automatically: Dragon Republic Internet Emergency Center.
He hesitated, then took it.
The voice was female, mid-thirties, crisp.
"Comrade Zhu Mingzhou. Listen carefully. Do not power off or leave your current location. Avoid conflict with anyone. Our nearest team is en route and will reach you in fifteen minutes."
"You're… government?"
"You have just bound the entire Earth civilization into an unknown but highly structured external system," she said, in the tone of someone reading out the weather. "You are now its confirmed random beacon, and its default 'first parser.' This means one thing: when it talks to Earth, it will talk to you first. We need you to cooperate and relay everything."
"I… can I not?" Zhu asked weakly.
"From the moment you hit YES," she said, "you already did."
"Can't you… re-roll the beacon? Give it to someone else?"
"It was random, and it picked someone who responded in real time." A pause. "Also, we have reason to believe it recognizes something in your physiology. That so-called 'Old God Fragment' it just activated, for example."
"You saw that too?"
"We saw enough." Her voice softened by half a degree. "It may be what this system is really interested in. Which means we cannot rule out the possibility that some non-terrestrial actors will take an active interest in you. Trying to connect to you. Or… remove you."
"Non-terrestrial," he echoed. "I heard you. You mean aliens."
"We don't rule it out," she said. "So, please, do us and yourself a favor—"
"Yeah?"
"Try not to press any more random YES buttons."
The line went dead.
Zhu sat on the curb at the mouth of the alley, rainwater curling around his sneakers, city lights smearing in the puddles. From somewhere over the ring road came the whoop of approaching sirens.
Yesterday, his biggest worry had been figuring out a flashy opening transition for a tourism promo.
Tonight, he was:
a globally exposed fugitive,a random beacon recognized by an extraterrestrial gladiatorial system,and apparently carrying an "Old God Fragment" in his head.
He wiped the rain off his face, laughed once—bitter, breathless.
"Okay," he told the dark, and the cheap, scuffed scanner in his hand. "If the universe insists on making me the mascot… let's see if the mascot survives tomorrow."