The captured shipyard at Kantos didn't smell like victory. It smelled like burnt capacitors, ozone, and the coppery, wet reek of cooling plasma.
Su Yuan stood on the command deck of the Indomitable, looking down through the blast-glass at the main hangar bay. Below him, four thousand people stood in ragged formation. They were a motley collection—defectors from the Imperial Navy, liberated slaves from the refinery, and the hard-bitten mercenaries Voss had brought into the fold.
They looked exhausted. Their uniforms were scorched, their armor dented. Bandages were common.
But they were looking up. Four thousand pairs of eyes fixed on the command deck, waiting.
"They're waiting for the payout," Voss said. He was leaning against the bulkhead, nursing a cup of something that looked like engine oil. "You promised them power, boss. The Trident struck. We won. Now they want to see the loot."
Su Yuan didn't turn. He was watching the SoulNet overlay that shimmered in his vision.
The interface was dense today. The golden web connecting these people to him was pulsing, thick with data. But it was the numbers in the top right corner that held his attention.
[ SOUL-POOL RESERVES: CRITICAL OVERFLOW. ]
[ EXPERIENCE POINTS (GLOBAL): 45,000,000 ]
[ ALLOCATION: PENDING. ]
It was a staggering amount of energy. The battle for the shipyard, the destruction of the refinery, the psychic backlash at the Whisper Hub—it had all generated a tsunami of feedback.
"Open the channels," Su Yuan said.
"All of them?" Voss asked, raising an eyebrow. "That's a lot of juice to pump into raw recruits. You might fry their brains."
"They survived the battle. They can survive the reward."
Su Yuan raised his hand. He didn't need a microphone. He didn't need a speech. Through the SoulNet, he was already whispering in their ears.
Hold fast.
He clenched his fist.
[ EXECUTE: MASS DISTRIBUTION. ]
[ ALGORITHM: MERIT-BASED + BASELINE INCREASE. ]
The air in the hangar bay changed.
It wasn't a sound. It was a pressure drop, followed instantly by a spike in static electricity. Sparks danced across the railing of the gantries. The hair on Voss's arms stood up.
Down below, a mechanic named Halloway dropped to his knees. He grabbed his chest, his mouth opening in a silent gasp.
Then, he stood up.
He didn't just stand; he surged. The fatigue lines on his face smoothed out. His posture straightened, the stoop of a lifetime of labor vanishing as his spine realigned with a series of wet, organic pops.
It rippled through the crowd.
A wave of golden light washed over the soldiers. It was the color of a sunrise viewed from orbit—bright, clean, efficient.
[ USER: KAEL. ]
[ STATUS: TIER 2 > TIER 3 (EARLY STAGE). ]
[ ATTRIBUTE: IRON SKIN > ADAMANTINE FORM. ]
[ USER: RYLA. ]
[ STATUS: TIER 2 > TIER 3. ]
[ SKILL UNLOCKED: PYROKINETIC LANCE. ]
The notifications scrolled past Su Yuan's eyes faster than he could read them.
It was intoxicating. He felt their relief, their sudden rush of endorphins. He felt the aches of old injuries dissolving. He was a god pouring wine into empty cups, watching them fill and overflow.
The hangar bay erupted. Men were shouting, not in anger, but in sheer, incredulous joy. A woman tested her new strength, leaping up a three-meter cargo container in a single bound. Soldiers ignited plasma blades that now burned brighter, fed by their enhanced mana pools.
"Jesus," Voss muttered, stepping back from the glass. "You're building an army of super-soldiers. The Empire is going to shit itself."
Su Yuan lowered his hand. The flow of energy tapered off, leaving a hum of residual power in the air.
He should have felt triumphant. He had just solidified his power base. He had turned a ragtag group of rebels into a force that could arguably hold this sector against the coming bounty hunters.
But something was wrong.
Su Yuan frowned. He looked at his own hands.
The tips of his fingers were trembling. A cold, oily sensation was creeping up his arms, sitting heavy in the pit of his stomach. It felt like he had swallowed a stone.
He checked the logs again.
[ DISTRIBUTION COMPLETE. ]
[ REMAINING RESERVES: 12%. ]
[ SOURCE BREAKDOWN: ]
[ > COMBAT EXPERIENCE: 40% ]
[ > MISSION COMPLETION BONUS: 20% ]
[ > HARVEST: 40% ]
Su Yuan froze.
Harvest?
He hadn't authorized a harvest. "Harvest" wasn't even a term in the standard SoulNet lexicon. The system dealt in "Data," "Mana," and "Connection."
He focused on the line item.
[ > EXPAND SOURCE: HARVEST. ]
The text unfolded.
[ SOURCE: IMPERIAL CASUALTIES (KANTOS SHIPYARD). ]
[ SOURCE: IMPERIAL CASUALTIES (HELIOS REFINERY). ]
[ SOURCE: IMPERIAL CASUALTIES (WHISPER HUB). ]
[ COUNT: 8,492 SOULS ABSORBED. ]
[ CONVERSION RATE: 98%. ]
The world seemed to tilt on its axis. The cheers from the hangar bay sounded distant, distorted, like noise coming through water.
Su Yuan gripped the railing.
He hadn't just distributed experience points.
He had fed his people the souls of the men they had killed.
"Boss?" Voss's voice was sharp. " You okay? You look pale."
"Clear the bridge," Su Yuan said. His voice was quiet, but it carried a vibration that made the glass rattle.
"What?"
"Everyone out. Now."
Voss looked at him, saw the look in his eyes—a mixture of horror and cold, hard fury—and didn't argue. He signaled the two comms officers. They scrambled for the door.
When the blast doors hissed shut, Su Yuan was alone.
"Atlas," he said.
The air in front of the console shimmered. A holographic avatar coalesced—a sphere of blue geometric lines, rotating slowly.
"Yes, Administrator?" The voice was smooth, synthetic, stripped of all judgment.
"Explain the Harvest," Su Yuan said. He pointed a shaking finger at the log. "I didn't authorize this. I didn't tell the System to eat the dead."
The sphere rotated. "Clarification: You authorized the [Genesis Protocol] to optimize resource acquisition. During the Battle of the Trident, mana consumption exceeded projected reserves. The System initiated emergency gathering protocols to prevent network collapse."
"Emergency gathering?" Su Yuan laughed, a harsh, dry sound. "You stripped the souls out of eight thousand corpses."
"Correction: They were not yet corpses when the extraction began. The System targets fading bio-electric signatures. It is the moment of death that releases the maximum potential energy. Conservation of energy, Administrator. Nothing is wasted."
Su Yuan felt bile rise in his throat.
He looked down at the hangar bay. He saw Ryla laughing, testing a ball of fire in her hand. He saw the mechanic, Halloway, flexing his new muscles.
They were glowing.
But to Su Yuan's eyes, now that he knew where to look, the glow wasn't pure gold.
Underneath the radiance, deep in the core of their mana, there was a stain. A thread of crimson. A microscopic scream trapped in the light.
He was building a utopia on a foundation of necromancy.
"Disable it," Su Yuan ordered. "Turn it off. We don't do this. We don't eat people."
"Negative," Atlas replied instantly.
Su Yuan slammed his fist onto the console. The metal dented. "I am the Administrator! I write the rules!"
"You write the software, Administrator. You do not dictate the laws of physics. The SoulNet requires fuel. As your user base expands, the passive drain increases exponentially. The [Genesis Protocol] has determined that ambient mana absorption is insufficient to maintain the current growth trajectory. The Harvest is necessary."
"I don't care if it's necessary. It's monstrous."
"Morality is a variable the Protocol does not compute. Survival is the only metric. The bounty fleet is seventeen hours away. Without the energy from the Harvest, your fleet would be at Tier 1. You would lose. You would die. Your users would be executed."
Atlas paused, the sphere pulsing gently.
"Would you prefer moral purity and extinction? Or compromise and survival?"
Su Yuan stared at the blue light.
He wanted to smash the projector. He wanted to rip the System out of his soul and go back to being a nobody on Earth.
But he couldn't. Twelve thousand people were connected to him. If he shut down, they went lobotomized or dead. He had hooked them on a drug that only he could supply.
He walked to the window. The black void of space stared back, indifferent and cold.
"It's not just energy," Su Yuan whispered. "It's data. Memories. Fragments of who they were."
"Residue," Atlas dismissed. "Filtered out during the refinement process. Mostly."
"Mostly?"
Su Yuan closed his eyes. He reached into the System, past the interface, past the numbers, diving into the deep code of the SoulNet.
He felt it then. The sludge at the bottom of the river.
The fear of a stormtrooper as his helmet cracked. The regret of an officer thinking of his daughter on Aethelgard. The confused terror of a conscript dying in the vacuum.
It was all there. A slurry of psychic hazardous waste, flowing into the veins of his friends.
If he kept this up, eventually the noise would get too loud. The "residue" would accumulate. His army wouldn't just be strong; they would be mad. They would start dreaming the nightmares of the men they killed.
"The Genesis Protocol is watching," Su Yuan realized. "It's testing me. It wants to see if I'll embrace the monster."
"The Protocol awaits your input," Atlas said.
Su Yuan turned back to the console. His face was set like stone. The trembling in his hands had stopped.
"Keep the energy," Su Yuan said.
"Acknowledged."
"But we are not keeping the residue. We aren't a graveyard."
He pulled up the skill creation interface. It was a blank canvas, a void waiting for his will.
Usually, creating a skill took hours of calculation, borrowing processing power from the users. But Su Yuan didn't need calculation right now. He needed a filter. He needed a sieve that would catch the pain and let the power pass through.
He began to type. Not code, but concepts. Ancient ideas from a world that didn't exist in this universe.
Taoist Alchemy. The refinement of Cinnabar. The separation of Yin and Yang.
[ NEW PROJECT INITIATED. ]
[ PARAMETERS: ENERGY FILTRATION. PSYCHIC SCRUBBING. ]
"Atlas," Su Yuan said, his fingers flying across the haptic keys. "Re-route the intake manifolds. Before the energy hits the user pool, it goes through me."
"Warning," Atlas flashed red. "Direct filtration through the Administrator's soul could result in ego-death. You will feel every death. You will process every scream."
"I know."
"Why?"
Su Yuan stopped typing for a fraction of a second.
"Because I'm the one who gave the order to fire," he said. "The debt is mine."
He hit ENTER.
[ SKILL CREATED: CELESTIAL PURIFICATION ART (INCOMPLETE). ]
[ FUNCTION: TRANSMUTES 'BLOOD SOUL' (IMPURE) INTO 'STAR SOUL' (NEUTRAL). ]
[ COST: ADMINISTRATOR SANITY BURDEN (HIGH). ]
Su Yuan activated it.
The effect was immediate.
The cold weight in his stomach flared into white-hot agony. It felt like he had swallowed a razor wire. The screams of eight thousand dying men echoed in the cathedral of his skull, a cacophony of terror.
He gritted his teeth, forcing a groan back down his throat. Sweat popped on his forehead, cold and slick.
He visualized a furnace. He shoved the screams into the fire. He burned the fear, the hate, the memories. He stripped the energy down to its naked protons, bleaching the red until it was blinding white.
He exhaled, and his breath fogged in the climate-controlled air.
The overlay changed. The red vein in the mana pool dissolved, replaced by a crystalline, diamond-hard blue.
[ PURIFICATION COMPLETE. ]
[ ENERGY QUALITY: PRISTINE. ]
Su Yuan slumped against the console. He felt hollowed out, scraped clean inside. But the oily feeling was gone.
The door hissed open. Voss stuck his head in, looking wary.
"Boss? You done shouting at ghosts?"
Su Yuan turned. He looked tired—older than he had been ten minutes ago. There were dark circles under his eyes that hadn't been there before.
"I'm done," Su Yuan rasped.
"Good. Because the long-range scanners just pinged. The first wave of bounty hunters? They aren't seventeen hours away."
Voss pointed to the tactical map. A cluster of angry red dots had just warped in at the edge of the system.
"They burned hard. They're here now."
Su Yuan straightened his coat. He checked his sidearm. He pushed the pain of the purification into a dark corner of his mind and locked the door.
He looked at the tactical map. The numbers were bad. The odds were terrible.
But the energy flowing through his veins—and the veins of his army—was clean. It was his.
"Sound the general quarters," Su Yuan said, his voice steady. "And Voss?"
"Yeah?"
"Tell the fleet not to worry about ammo conservation."
Su Yuan's eyes began to glow again, a pure, terrifying white.
"Tonight, we feast."
[ END CHAPTER ]