The heavy steel door of the container slid shut, engaging the three deadbolts. The noise of the slums was instantly muffled, replaced by the hum of the air cycler and Rin's shallow breathing.
Mei didn't relax. She moved like a cat in a room full of rocking chairs—smooth, tense, and ready to bolt. She tapped her temple, her eyes glowing with a faint blue ring as she scanned the room for bugs.
"Clean," she announced, her voice losing the amplified distortion she used outside. "You live in a tin can, Kai. No digital footprint because there's no tech to track."
"Poverty is the best encryption," Kai muttered. He went to the sink and washed the blood—Goran's and his own—off his hands.
Mei leaned against the workbench, crossing her arms. The optical-camouflage suit she wore rippled, trying to match the color of the rusted wall behind her before settling on a matte gray.
"Show me," she said.
Kai didn't hesitate. He knew Mei. She was a mercenary, driven by profit, but she operated on a code of transactional honor. If she betrayed a client, her reputation in the underworld would crash, and in the Dyson Sectors, reputation was the only currency that didn't inflate.
He pulled the Faraday bag from his pocket and tossed it to her.
Mei caught it. She pulled a small, high-end portable scanner—a "deck"—from her belt. She connected a cable to the bag's external port, trying to read the contents without opening the shielding.
"Initiating handshake protocol," she murmured.
Her deck sparked.
Zap.
Mei yelped and dropped the device. Smoke curled from its screen.
"What the hell?" She stared at her fried equipment. "That thing just fried a military-grade logic gate. It's running an encryption algorithm I've never seen. It's not binary."
"It's not?" Kai asked.
"It's... trinary? Chaos code? I don't know." Mei looked at Kai with a mix of fear and greed. "Kai, this isn't just a data-shard. This is Class-0 Contraband. If the Firewall finds this, they won't just arrest you. They'll format this entire sector just to be sure it's gone."
She unsealed the bag carefully. The purple glow of the jagged crystal filled the room.
"It's beautiful," she whispered. "And it's leaking. My HUD is glitching just looking at it."
"It tried to install itself into me," Kai said quietly.
Mei looked at him sharply. "Into you? You don't have a port. You're a Null."
"I know. But it spoke to me. Text in my head."
Mei paced the small room. "That's impossible. Unless..." She stopped. "Unless it's a Bio-Script. Pre-System tech. Before humans uploaded their consciousness to the Cloud, code was written to run on biological neural networks. Wet-ware."
She looked at Kai. "It's not designed for a machine, Kai. It's designed for a brain. A raw, un-augmented brain."
Kai looked at the shard. He thought of the power he had felt when he siphoned the fever from Rin. That was just a taste—a leakage. If he could control it...
"What happens if I boot it?" Kai asked.
"Best case? You unlock a legacy operating system with admin privileges," Mei theorized. "Worst case? It fries your nervous system and you die screaming while your brain melts out of your ears."
She paused. "Actually, the worst case is you survive, and the Root Administrator notices you."
Kai looked at Rin sleeping on the cot. He looked at the debt notice on the table.
"I'm already dead," Kai said. "I'm just waiting for the system to process the paperwork."
He walked over and picked up the crystal.
"Kai, wait—" Mei started.
Kai didn't wait. He gripped the shard tight in his fist.
"System," Kai whispered. "Run."
It didn't start with a beep. It started with a scream.
Kai's hand felt like it had been dipped in liquid nitrogen. The cold shot up his arm, bypassing his skin and burrowing directly into the nerves.
He fell to his knees, gasping.
>> CRITICAL ERROR: UNRECOGNIZED HARDWARE.>> FORCING COMPATIBILITY...>> REWRITING BIOLOGICAL DRIVERS...
The text exploded in his vision. It wasn't just text anymore; it was sensory input. He could taste the color blue. He could hear the math of the room's dimensions.
The shard in his hand dissolved. It didn't melt; it simply ceased to be physical matter and became pure energy, shooting into his palm.
Kai arched his back, a silent scream caught in his throat.
His veins turned black. The network of blood vessels in his arm stood out like a roadmap of ink, pulsing with the chaotic purple light of the shard. The corruption spread—up his shoulder, across his chest, and up his neck.
"Kai!" Mei rushed forward, grabbing a syringe of adrenaline from her belt. "Don't die on me!"
"Don't... touch... me!" Kai gasped.
He knew if she touched him now, the installation would kill her too.
He was inside the code now.
He wasn't in the room. He was floating in a void of falling green numbers . But the numbers were wrong. They were broken, jagged, glitching.
A massive, towering structure loomed in the digital distance—the Heaven Server. It was a fortress of golden light, perfect and impenetrable.
And Kai was a speck of dirt trying to break in.
>> ERROR: ACCESS DENIED.>> FIREWALL ENGAGED.
A wall of red fire erupted in front of him. The security protocol of the universe trying to reject the virus.
Kai felt his mind burning. He was going to die. He was a Null. He had no authority here.
Then, a voice spoke from the darkness of the void. It wasn't the robotic System voice. It was a rasping, sarcastic voice that sounded like grinding metal.
"Access denied? Boring."
A shape materialized next to Kai in the digital void. It was a shifting, geometric polygon, constantly glitching and rearranging itself.
"You're a persistent little bug, aren't you?" the entity said. "Trying to side-load the Entropy Sutra on a meat-processor? That's ballsy. Or stupid."
"Who... are you?" Kai projected the thought.
"I'm the patch," the entity replied. "I'm the thing they tried to delete. Call me Cipher."
The red fire of the Firewall roared closer.
"Listen, kid," Cipher said rapidly. "You can't fight the Firewall with Order. You don't have the permissions. You have to fight it with Chaos. Break the rules."
"How?"
"Don't try to solve the equation," Cipher laughed, the sound glitching into static. "Corrupt it."
Cipher shot forward, slamming into Kai's digital avatar.
>> INTEGRATION: CIPHER.EXE.>> STATUS: MALWARE DETECTED.>> IGNORING SAFETY PROTOCOLS.
In the real world, Kai's eyes snapped open. The whites of his eyes were gone, replaced by a swirling void of black and purple static.
The pain vanished, replaced by a cold, limitless clarity.
He looked at his hand. The black veins had settled, forming intricate, tattoo-like circuit patterns that glowed faintly under his skin.
>> INSTALLATION COMPLETE.>> WELCOME TO THE ENTROPY SUTRA.>> CURRENT RANK: HARDWARE FORGE (GLITCHED).
Kai stood up. The air around him distorted, as if the reality rendering engine was struggling to draw him.
Mei was backed against the wall, her pistol drawn, her face pale.
"Kai?" she asked, her voice trembling. "What are you?"
Kai looked at a rusted metal chair in the corner. He didn't just see a chair. He saw its source code.
Object: Chair. Material: Iron. Durability: 12/100.
He reached out. He didn't use force. He simply... edited it.
He clenched his fist.
CRUNCH.
The metal chair imploded instantly, crumpled into a ball of scrap the size of an apple by an invisible force.
Kai looked at his hand. He felt the drain—a sharp hunger in his gut—but the power was intoxicating. He hadn't used Qi. He hadn't used a spell. He had simply introduced a variable of "Collapse" into the object's code.
"I am the Glitch," Kai whispered .
He turned to Mei. The static faded from his eyes, returning them to their normal dark color, though a faint shadow lingered at the edges.
"The boot was successful," Kai said calmly, as if he hadn't just rewritten physics. "Now, about that debt."
Mei lowered her gun, exhaling slowly. "You're a monster, Kai. A valuable monster."
She holstered her weapon. "If you can do that... we don't need to pay the Vipers."
"No," Kai agreed. He picked up his iron pipe. It felt like a toothpick now. "We don't pay."
"We liquidate," Kai said.