The Junkyard was not silent. It had a frequency.
To the cultivators of the Divine Silicon Sect living in the rings above, silence was a luxury bought with Karma points—a noise-canceling algorithm subscribed to monthly. But down here in the Lower Realm, the silence was simply the dead space between screams .
Kai moved through the "Bit-Stream," a valley carved out of the landscape by a river of leaking coolant fluid that cascaded down from the Middle Realm. The liquid was a glowing, toxic green, sluggish and warm. It carried with it the physical refuse of the gods: crushed servers, severed android limbs, and occasionally, "Packet Loss."
Packet Loss was the lifeblood of the scavengers. When the transport ships moving between the sectors dumped their waste, or when a storage cache in the cloud corrupted and purged its physical backups, it fell here.
Kai adjusted the rebreather mask over his face. It was a makeshift device, a plastic bottle filled with charcoal filters he'd crushed himself. It tasted like ash, but it kept the worst of the microscopic glass dust out of his lungs.
He didn't look at the river. He looked at the shores.
The banks of the Bit-Stream were lined with mountains of e-waste that shifted like sand dunes. Kai's boots, wrapped in layers of rubber tire treads, found purchase on a pile of discarded motherboards. He climbed, his breath rattling in the mask.
Scan complete. No movement.
He reached the crest of the trash dune and pulled out a pair of binoculars. They were purely optical—antique lenses in a brass housing. No digital zoom, no thermal overlay, no connection to the System. Just glass.
"Analog is secure," Kai muttered to himself.
If he used digital optics, the System would log his location. The Firewall—the government enforcers—tracked every active lens in the sector to monitor for unauthorized scavenging . But glass? Glass had no IP address.
He scanned the horizon. About three kilometers east, near the base of a massive, rusted support pillar that held up the sky, smoke was rising.
Not the black smoke of burning tires. Blue smoke.
"Ionized data," Kai noted. "Fresh drop."
He checked his wrist. He didn't wear a smartwatch; he wore a mechanical wind-up watch he'd repaired. 02:00 AM. The scavengers from the Copper-Wire Viper gang would be waking up soon . He had a thirty-minute head start, calculated based on their average drug-induced stupor time.
He began to run.
Navigating the Junkyard was an exercise in geometry and pain. The terrain was hostile. Jagged shards of metal stuck out of the ground like punji sticks. Pools of stagnant water hid sinkholes of corrosive sludge.
Kai moved with a fluidity that defied his lack of cultivation. He didn't have the Hardware Forge enhancements that reinforced bones with titanium . He had calluses and muscle memory. He vaulted over a rusted engine block, slid under a precarious archway of tangled fiber-optic cables, and kept his center of gravity low.
As he got closer to the blue smoke, the air began to feel heavy. Static electricity prickled his skin. The hair on his arms stood up.
This was the "Qi" of this world—nano-machines suspended in the air, waiting for a command .
For a cultivator, this area would be a paradise of dense energy. They would open their pores, activate their "Meridians" (implanted fiber-optics), and absorb the ambient data to recharge their batteries .
For Kai, it was just a headache. The density of the nano-swarms interfered with his biological nervous system, causing a low-level buzzing in his teeth.
He crested the final ridge and looked down into the crater.
It was a fresh impact site. The trash had been blasted away in a perfect circle, revealing the dark, metallic floor of the sector's shell. In the center of the crater sat a pod.
It wasn't a standard cargo container. It was sleek, black, and shaped like a tear-drop. But it was damaged. The hull was breached, and blue sparks were arcing wildly from the opening, igniting the surrounding piles of plastic.
"Corporate courier pod," Kai diagnosed instantly. "High priority."
He slid down the side of the crater, his boots surfing on a landslide of loose capacitors. He hit the bottom and drew his iron pipe.
He approached the pod cautiously. The markings on the side were burned off, but the design screamed Void Financial Group . Only the bankers could afford stealth couriers this aerodynamic.
Why was it here? The Void Group didn't make mistakes. They calculated risk better than anyone. A crash meant sabotage.
Kai reached the breach in the hull. The heat was intense. He squinted against the blue glare. Inside the pod, the pilot was dead—liquefied by the G-force of the impact. The cockpit was a mess of gore and fused circuitry.
But the cargo hold was intact.
Kai jammed his pipe into the release lever of the cargo hatch and put his entire weight behind it. Leverage = Force x Distance. The metal groaned, then popped. The hatch hissed open.
Inside, suspended in a magnetic field that was failing, was a single object.
It wasn't a crate of credits. It wasn't a weapon.
It was a shard of crystal, rough-hewn and jagged, pulsing with a chaotic, purple light. It looked... old. Ancient. In a world of perfect geometric polygons and seamless silicon, this looked like a rock.
A Data-Shard.
"Forbidden tech," Kai whispered.
He knew what this was. The legends in the slums spoke of "Raw Data"—information from before the System, before the Dyson Swarm was optimized . The Firewall deleted anyone found in possession of such things.
Kai's instinct was to run. This was heat he couldn't handle.
Then he thought of Rin. He thought of the debt collector, Iron-Skin. He thought of the 50 credits he needed for suppressors.
A Forbidden Data-Shard could sell for 500 credits on the black market. Maybe 1,000 if he found a collector who didn't ask questions. It was enough to move them out of the slums. It was enough to buy Rin a new life.
"Risk accepted," Kai said.
He reached into his pack and pulled out a Faraday bag—a pouch lined with lead and copper mesh to block signals. He couldn't touch the shard with his bare hands; the raw data would likely burn his nerves.
He used a pair of insulated tongs to grab the shard.
As soon as the crystal left the magnetic field, the air in the crater screamed.
It wasn't a sound. It was a digital feedback loop. Every screen in a five-mile radius would be glitching right now. The shard was "leaking" code.
ERROR. ERROR. UNREGISTERED_VARIABLE_DETECTED.
The text flashed across Kai's vision—not on a HUD, but seemingly burned into his retinas. He blinked, staggering back. He didn't have implants. How was he seeing system text?
"Get in the bag," he grunted, shoving the shard into the Faraday pouch and sealing the velcro.
The screaming stopped. The purple light vanished.
Kai's heart hammered against his ribs. He shoved the pouch into the deepest pocket of his jacket. He needed to leave. Now.
He turned to climb out of the crater—and froze.
Silhouettes lined the rim of the depression. Five of them.
They wore scavenged leather armor adorned with copper wiring wrapped around their limbs to simulate muscles. Their eyes glowed with cheap, mismatched optical implants.
The Copper-Wire Vipers .
The leader, a man with a jaw replaced by a rusted speaker grille, looked down at Kai. He held a serrated machete that hummed with a low-voltage current.
"Null," the leader's voice synthesized, static-heavy and distorted. "You found something shiny."
Kai tightened his grip on his iron pipe. He was one boy with no cultivation against five thugs in the early stages of Hardware Forge.
"Just scrap," Kai said, his voice flat. "Burned out. Worthless."
"The scanner spiked," the leader said. "Big energy. God-tier energy." He pointed the machete at Kai. "Hand it over, little rat. And maybe we only break your legs."
Kai looked at the five men. He looked at the steep walls of the crater. He calculated the odds.
Enemy count: 5. Weapons: Electrified melee. Escape routes: 0.
Optimization rate: Critical.
Kai slowly reached into his pocket. The Vipers grinned, anticipating the surrender.
Kai pulled out the bio-capacitor he had harvested from the rat earlier. It was leaking blue fluid.
"Catch," Kai said.
He threw the capacitor—not at the men, but at the sparking, exposed power coupling of the crashed pod behind him.
The wet capacitor hit the live wires.
Short circuit.
BOOM.
The remaining fuel cells in the courier pod detonated. A wave of blue fire and superheated steam blasted outward.
It wasn't enough to kill the Vipers on the ridge, but the shockwave knocked them off their feet, blinding their cheap optical sensors with thermal overload.
Kai didn't wait to see them fall. He was already moving, scrambling up the opposite side of the crater while the smoke was still thick.
He ran into the Bit-Stream, disappearing into the toxic fog, the Forbidden Shard burning a hole in his pocket.
The hunt had begun.