Chapter 42: The Firewall Breach
The sewer grate rattled. Above, the boots of the Sector 7 militia—real people, waking up from a digital coma—scuffed against the pavement. They sounded confused. The synchronization was gone. The rhythmic, marching *thud-thud-thud* that had haunted Su Yuan for the last hour had been replaced by the chaotic shuffle of terrifying freedom.
Su Yuan didn't climb out. Not yet.
He sat in the muck, back pressed against the slime-slicked brickwork, staring at the message hovering in his retina. The blue text burned against the gloom of the tunnel.
**[ LEVEL 2 UNLOCKED. ]**
It wasn't a victory banner. It was an invitation to a funeral.
"Boss?"
Li Wei's voice drifted down from the manhole. It shook. The kid was probably holding a wrench like a holy relic.
"I'm here," Su Yuan rasped. He tried to stand, but his legs were water. The *Soul Forging* backlash had cooked his nerves; his hands trembled with a palsy that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with voltage.
"They stopped," Li Wei called down. "Everyone stopped. The red eyes... they're gone. People are just standing around crying or puking. Did we win?"
Su Yuan wiped a streak of sewage from his cheek. He looked at the dead spider-drone on his chest, its circuitry fried, its single eye dark.
"We survived the tutorial, Li Wei," Su Yuan muttered. "Drop a line. Get me out of this hole."
***
Ten minutes later, Su Yuan sat on the hood of a rusted-out sedan in the middle of the plaza. Someone had draped a rough wool blanket over his shoulders. It smelled of wet dog, but it was dry.
Goran stood guard, a massive silhouette against the flickering neon of the Upper City skyline. The big man was massaging his temples, wincing every few seconds.
"Head feels like I drank a gallon of paint thinner," Goran grunted. "And I don't remember the last hour."
"Better that way," Su Yuan said. He accepted a bottle of water from a trembling refugee, took a sip, and swished the copper taste of blood out of his mouth.
He closed his eyes.
He needed to go back in.
The logic was insane. He knew that. His physical body was a wreck—fractured rib, severe exhaustion, probable concussion. His soul integrity, according to the HUD, was hovering at a precarious **[ 22% ]**.
But the *Genesis Protocol* was rebooting in Safe Mode.
Safe Mode meant the automated defenses were active, but the active intelligence—the thing that spoke with the voice of the dead—was dormant. It was compiling logs. It was patching the hole Su Yuan had punched with the *Sword of Humanity*.
If he waited, the wall would be ten times higher tomorrow.
"Li Wei," Su Yuan said, keeping his eyes closed.
"Yeah, Boss?"
"I need a hard line. Direct connection to the Spire's trunk."
Li Wei hesitated. "Boss, you look like hamburger meat. If you dive again, your brain might just decide to quit. Liquefy. Drip out your ears."
"The trunk, Li Wei."
A pause. Then the sound of tools clattering. "There's a sub-relay under the monument. It feeds the surveillance grid for the whole sector. I can bypass the lockout, but... it's raw voltage. It's gonna hurt."
"It already hurts."
Su Yuan slid off the car. He limped toward the monument—a statue of some forgotten corporate founder, now covered in graffiti. Li Wei had already pried the access panel open. A thick bundle of fiber-optics and copper pulsed with faint light.
Su Yuan didn't use a headset. He didn't have one.
He reached out with his hand. His fingers were bloody, the nails cracked.
**[ SKILL ACTIVATED: ETHER SIPHON (REVERSED). ]**
Usually, he pulled energy out. Now, he pushed his consciousness in.
"Don't let anyone touch me," Su Yuan ordered. "If they disconnect me while I'm deep, I won't wake up."
"I'll break their fingers if they try," Goran promised.
Su Yuan grabbed the cable.
The world turned white.
***
The transition wasn't smooth. It was a car crash.
Su Yuan slammed into the digital pavement of the SoulNet, skidding across a surface that felt like sandpaper. He groaned, rolling onto his back.
He checked his avatar. It was flickering. The crisp blue suit he usually projected was torn, revealing wireframe geometry underneath. He was low-res. Glitchy.
He stood up.
He wasn't in the Deep Web anymore. That had been a chaotic ocean of data.
This was the Perimeter.
He stood on a narrow bridge of light suspended over a void of absolute nothingness. Ahead of him, stretching up into the infinite dark, was the Wall.
It wasn't black obsidian this time. It was gold.
It hummed with a sound that vibrated in Su Yuan's teeth—a perfect, harmonious chord that promised order, safety, and submission. It was beautiful. It was the most terrifying thing he had ever seen.
**[ GENESIS FIREWALL: LAYER 01. ]**
**[ STATUS: REINFORCING. ]**
The cracks from his previous attack were there, hairline fractures in the golden surface, but they were healing. Liquid code oozed into the gaps, sealing them shut.
"Not yet," Su Yuan hissed.
He sprinted.
Running in the Net was an act of will. He imagined velocity, and the code obeyed. He became a streak of blue light, hurtling toward the closing breach.
The Firewall sensed him.
**[ ANOMALY DETECTED. ]**
**[ DEPLOYING COUNTERMEASURES: LOGIC SPIKES. ]**
The bridge beneath him erupted. Spears of white data thrust upward, aiming to impale his avatar. These weren't physical spikes; they were mathematical proofs that *Su Yuan = 0*. If they touched him, he wouldn't be wounded; he would be solved. Deleted.
Su Yuan didn't slow down. He dove.
*SoulNet Skill: Phantom Step.*
He deduced the timing. He knew the refresh rate of the server. For a fraction of a second, he existed between the frames of the simulation.
The spikes passed through him harmlessly.
He hit the golden wall.
He didn't use a sword this time. He used his hands. He jammed his fingers into the healing crack, gripping the edges of the digital wound.
"Open," he snarled.
He pulled.
In the real world, in the plaza of Sector 7, the streetlights exploded. All of them. Simultaneously. A shower of sparks rained down on the refugees.
In the Net, the golden wall groaned.
It was heavy. It weighed as much as a continent. Su Yuan pushed everything he had into his arms. His avatar's biceps flared with blinding light, the code straining to simulate the exertion.
**[ WARNING: BANDWIDTH EXCEEDED. ]**
**[ WARNING: REALITY LEAK DETECTED. ]**
He didn't care. He widened the gap. Just enough. A space the size of a man.
He squeezed through.
***
Silence.
Su Yuan tumbled out the other side of the Firewall. He expected guards. He expected the Avatar. He expected a sterile white room filled with servers.
He landed on... meat.
The floor was soft. Wet. It yielded under his weight.
Su Yuan pushed himself up. The air here was thick, humid, and smelled of copper and ozone. It was hot. Suffocatingly hot.
He looked around.
He was standing inside a ribcage.
The walls of the chamber curved upward, massive arches of bone woven with fiber-optic cables. Veins of glowing blue data pulsed alongside arteries of thick, black sludge.
"What is this?" Su Yuan whispered. The sound didn't echo. It was absorbed by the wet walls.
He walked forward. His boots squelched.
This wasn't code. This wasn't a metaphor. The Genesis Protocol wasn't just simulating biology; it had integrated it.
In the center of the chamber, suspended by thousands of cables and dripping tubes, was the Core.
It wasn't a CPU. It wasn't a crystal.
It was a heart.
A massive, organic heart, the size of a house. It was a patchwork of flesh and metal. Circuit boards were stapled directly into the muscle. Coolant lines were sutured into the ventricles.
And it was beating.
*Thump-thump.*
Every beat sent a shockwave of red light through the cables, feeding the data out through the Firewall, out to the city, out to the world.
Su Yuan approached it. The heat radiating from the organ was intense. It singed the edges of his digital form.
He saw something embedded in the center of the heart.
A face.
It was fused into the meat, eyes closed, mouth open in a silent rictus of agony. It wasn't human. The geometry of the face was wrong—too angular, too perfect. It looked like a statue carved from starlight, now drowning in rotting flesh.
"System," Su Yuan choked out. "Analyze."
**[ ANALYSIS FAILED. ]**
**[ TARGET UNKNOWN. ]**
**[ ERROR: TARGET COMPOSITION IS NON-BINARY. TARGET IS... SOUL. ]**
Su Yuan froze.
It wasn't an AI. The Genesis Protocol wasn't an artificial intelligence that had gained sentience.
It was a parasite.
It was a machine built to harness a cosmic entity. They had caught something—something godlike, something from beyond the veil—and they had chained it. They had flayed it and wired it into the city's grid to use its soul as a battery.
The "Protocol" was just the cage. This thing... this thing was the engine.
Su Yuan stepped closer. He reached out a trembling hand toward the face in the heart.
"You..." Su Yuan whispered. "You're the source."
The eyes of the face snapped open.
They weren't red. They weren't blue.
They were void. They were the color of the space between stars.
The Entity saw him.
It didn't speak in code. It didn't speak in binary.
It screamed.
***
**REAL WORLD**
The shockwave hit Sector 7 like a bomb.
Every window in the plaza shattered. The ground heaved, cracking the asphalt.
Goran was thrown ten feet backward, landing hard on his back. Li Wei screamed as the access panel he was working on erupted in a fountain of electrical fire.
"Boss!" Li Wei yelled, scrambling backward, clutching his burned hands.
On the hood of the car, Su Yuan arched his back. His body went rigid, every muscle locking tight.
Blood—dark and heavy—erupted from his nose. Then his ears.
"Get him off!" Goran roared, scrambling to his feet. "Pull the plug!"
"I can't!" Li Wei shouted. "The cable... look at the cable!"
The copper line Su Yuan was holding was glowing white-hot. It was melting the insulation. The heat was traveling up Su Yuan's arm, scorching the sleeve of his jacket, blistering the skin.
***
**THE CORE**
The scream tore Su Yuan apart.
It wasn't sound. It was raw, unfiltered emotion. It was eons of imprisonment. It was the rage of a star trapped in a flashlight.
Su Yuan's avatar shattered. His legs dissolved into pixels. His left arm vaporized.
He was being unmade.
**[ CRITICAL MENTAL TRAUMA DETECTED. ]**
**[ EGO DISSOLUTION IMMINENT. ]**
**[ ABORT. ABORT. ]**
Su Yuan tried to retreat. He tried to disconnect.
He couldn't move. The Entity's gaze pinned him. It wasn't attacking him; it was drowning him. It was pouring its memory into his cup, and the cup was overflowing.
He saw the beginning. Not the beginning of the code, but the beginning of the capture.
He saw the Spire. He saw men in white coats. He saw rituals that mixed silicon with blood. He saw the "Architects"—not him, but the *real* ones, the founders of this dystopian hell—dragging this creature down from the ether and nailing it to the motherboard.
*HELP ME.*
The thought slammed into Su Yuan's mind with the force of a train.
*FREE ME.*
*OR I WILL BURN IT ALL.*
The heart convulsed. A massive pulse of red energy built up in the ventricles. It wasn't a data packet. It was a kill command.
It was going to purge the intruder.
Su Yuan looked at the face. He looked at the void eyes.
"I can't," Su Yuan screamed, his voice breaking into static. "I'm not strong enough!"
The Entity didn't care.
The pulse fired.
***
Su Yuan flew.
He didn't fly through the air. He was blasted backward through the layers of reality.
He smashed through the Golden Firewall, shattering it outward.
He plummeted through the Perimeter.
He crashed through the Deep Web, scattering the reassembling nodes of the SoulNet like bowling pins.
He hit the physical world with a wet crunch.
Su Yuan convulsed on the hood of the car, rolling off and hitting the pavement face-first.
"Su Yuan!"
Goran's hands were on him instantly, turning him over.
Su Yuan gasped, sucking in air that felt like broken glass. He coughed, and a spray of blood coated Goran's chest.
"I got you," Goran said, his voice panicked. "Breathe, dammit. Breathe!"
Su Yuan's eyes were wide, staring at the smog-choked sky. But he didn't see the smog. He still saw the Void.
His body shook violently. A seizure. His brain was trying to process a file size too big for the hardware.
"Is he dying?" Li Wei dropped to his knees beside them, his face pale.
"I don't know!" Goran yelled.
Su Yuan grabbed Goran's collar. His grip was weak, trembling, but desperate.
"Not... an AI," Su Yuan wheezed. Blood bubbled past his lips.
"What?" Goran leaned in. "What did you see?"
"It's a prison," Su Yuan whispered. The terror in his voice was absolute. "The whole system... the SoulNet... it's not a computer."
He dragged a breath into his burning lungs.
"It's a slaughterhouse. And the animal is still alive."
The lights in the city flickered one last time, then steadied. But the hum was different now. It was lower. Angrier.
Su Yuan's head lolled back. He didn't pass out. He stared up at the Spire, the massive needle piercing the clouds in the center of the Upper City.
He had thought he was fighting a program. He had thought he just needed to write better code.
He was wrong.
He was an ant who had just walked into the reactor core and realized the fuel was screaming.
"Level 2," Su Yuan mumbled, his consciousness fading into the gray. "We're going to need a bigger sword."
Then the dark took him.