The aftershocks of the explosion at Warehouse 7 had not yet fully subsided over the black rain of East Wharf when another, deeper and more violent tremor began to reverberate through Aaryan's veins.
He huddled behind an abandoned container not far from the crater, his rapid breaths condensing into puffs of white mist in the cold air. The half-shattered obsidian scale in his pocket radiated intense heat, seemingly capable of burning a hole in his palm. However, the silver-grey 'Etheric Suppression Bracelet' fastened to his right wrist posed a deadlier threat.
He had worn it as a disguise when he first entered the Maya District, to conceal his royal lineage and evade the Holy Blood Council's scans. Now, this once indestructible bracelet was emitting a teeth-grinding metallic scraping sound; tiny cracks were spreading across its surface like a spider's web and purplish-gold energy was occasionally seeping from the fissures.
"Damn it… stop, stop!" Aaryan cursed under his breath, pressing his left hand tightly against his right wrist and trying to use his remaining willpower to suppress the uncontrolled Qi within his body.
But he couldn't calm down. The scenes that had just unfolded at the altar — his compatriots hanging on hooks, the child turning to ashes in his arms and Malakor laughing at life — were branding themselves repeatedly into the depths of his consciousness like red-hot irons. In the logic of fantasy cultivation, this was already an ingrained "heart demon"; in the Etherpunk system, it was called "emotional data overload".
Because Aaryan had forcibly absorbed a massive amount of negative karma at the core of the altar, the royal bloodline within him had progressed from 'awakening' to 'rage'.
Crack—
Another sharp sound echoed through the air and the crack in the bracelet widened further. A burst of purple-gold sparks erupted, piercing the thick metal of the shipping container and igniting a dazzling blue-white flame.
'Warning: Unauthorised etheric fluctuation detected. Waveform analysis indicates an S-rank royal sequence. Connecting to the Holy Blood Council's central monitoring station.'
Nearby, a crooked electronic monitoring pole sensed the energy overflow, its red scanning eye instantly lighting up and locking onto the target. A cold, synthesised electronic voice pierced the rainy night, its sharp alarm shattering the tranquillity of the eastern district.
'Aaryan, your threshold has been exceeded!' Cyrus's anxious voice came through the fallen communicator, accompanied by loud static. 'That bracelet can't withstand your anger. Once it shatters completely, the energy wave you unleash will illuminate the entire Maya District as brightly as the sun at night. At that moment, all the 'Soul Cleansers' will teleport to your location instantly!"
Aaryan looked up abruptly, his eyes now a flowing dark gold. He could feel the collective rage of the Demon Clan, suppressed for decades, seeking an outlet through his body — that of a 'Zeroer'.
'Then let them come,' he said hoarsely, his voice carrying a chilling intent to kill.
The bracelet vibrated violently again, its purplish-gold light illuminating half of his arm, and a translucent crystal appeared — a sign that his anger was about to break through its threshold; a countdown to the city's spontaneous combustion. Meanwhile, the storm in Maya District raged even more fiercely and the entire city seemed to be crumbling along with the crack on Aaryan's wrist.
The siren wailed mournfully through the rainy night at East Wharf, its high-frequency noise seeming to pierce the bone.
'Target locked: East Wing Container Zone B-12. Threat level: Extremely High."
Four jet-black mechs, known as "Punishment Hounds", roared down from mid-air, their undersides spewing eerie green ethereal flames. These mechs had no pilots, but were instead controlled by the central AI of the Holy Blood Council. Each mech's mechanical arm was equipped with a 'Spirit-Locking Hook' designed specifically to target the Demonic Bloodline.
'Get out of my way, or you will die.'
Aaryan didn't look up. He remained on his knees, gripping the nearly shattered bracelet tightly in his left hand. A purplish-gold energy danced between his fingers like a primordial beast trying to break free of its cage.
'Unregistered royal blood discovered. In accordance with Section 402 of the Maya District Order Law, immediate erasure is to be carried out.'
Without hesitation, the foremost 'Punishment Hound' opened its mechanical arm and fired a 'Spirit-Locking Hook' crackling with high-voltage electricity straight at Aaryan's throat.
Clang!
A crisp metallic clang rang out. In the darkness, a dark red greatsword fell like a meteor, deflecting the Spirit-Locking Hook precisely. Balthazar's burly figure blocked Aaryan's path. His muscles bulged with rage and the dark red runes gleamed brightly in the rain.
'Want to touch him? Ask my sword first!" Balthazar spat a stream of bloody saliva, his eyes icy.
Gradually dissipating in the cold rain, the smoke from the battle at the dock's edge left the wreckage of the four 'Punishment Hounds' like silent tombstones. Aaryan stood in the rain. The purplish-gold bone on his right hand had not faded with the end of the battle. Freed from the constraints of the 'Suppression Bracelet', it was now absorbing the 'Dark Ether' in the air.
'Aaryan, you need to look at this.' Cyrus crouched under a leaky eave, clutching the bronze terminal, which he called the 'computation core', tightly in his arms. Data streams exploded on the screen, and the dense red dots on the Maya District map were rapidly converging.
"Malakor has activated the 'Hive Protocol'." Cyrus pointed at the screen, his voice trembling slightly. 'The Holy Blood Council is no longer satisfied with covert arrests. They are activating the "hatred circuits" of all law enforcement officers in the city. This is an asymmetric attack based on steampunk logic. They are using soul fragments extracted from their colleagues as fuses to forcefully resonate the anger within the entire demon race. Once the 'collective anger threshold' in the Maya District reaches 100%, the entire underlying ecosystem will collapse and turn into nutrients to nourish the Holy Blood Council's top-level crystal.' 'This is the cruelest aspect of the Maya District: the "cause-and-effect feedback mechanism". The greater the anger of the rebels, the purer the energy that the Holy Blood Council can convert. In this game, the stronger Aaryan becomes, the more excited the enemy seems to become.
Therefore, killing alone won't solve the problem. Aaryan lowered his eyes, his purple-gold pupils reflecting the data on the terminal. 'What we need isn't an outburst, but a "counterbalance".'
He turned to look at Balthazar, who was polishing his greatsword, and Pau, who looked grave.
'We need a "container" that can hold this level of anger.' Aaryan extended his right hand, lightly tapping the air with his fingertip. A purple-gold rune appeared, resembling a 'spirit-gathering array' from fantasy systems yet possessing a complex mechanical code architecture. "Cyrus, can you rewrite the logic of the Maya District Clock Tower? If I direct the city's anger towards myself and you're responsible for converting it into a zero-sum signal before the 'Primal Singularity' erupts..."
'That requires your consciousness to be directly connected to the city's etheric core.' Cyrus gasped. 'That's equivalent to using your brain as the fuse for the entire Maya District. Once overloaded, you will vanish completely.'
'I've already "vanished" once in Warehouse 7.' Aaryan smiled faintly; a particularly resolute smile in the flickering neon lights.
Meanwhile, inside the Holy Blood Council Temple atop the highest dome of the Maya District,
Malakor stood before the massive crystal curtain wall, looking down at the boiling city below. His withered hands were tucked into his sleeves. In the shadows behind him, rows of 'Grand Inquisitors', dressed in silver robes and blindfolded with electronic ribbons, were ready and waiting.
'That royal remnant thinks he's redeeming himself,' Malakor's voice echoed in the empty hall. "He doesn't know how long I've waited for this moment. Pure rage is the only key to unlocking the treasure from 1969. Send the order: withdraw all the hounds from the docks and release them into the clock tower. I want to see him light this final fire with his own hands."
A black storm was brewing.
With a flick of Malakor's finger, the grey-black clouds shrouding the Maya District were torn apart by powerful red beams of light — the city-wide ethereal barrier activated by the Holy Blood Council's highest aerial fortress, the 'Holy Judgement'.
'Attention all citizens, an irreparable system error has been detected in the Maya District. A 'formatting' cleansing process is underway.'
This cold announcement was accompanied by a deafening roar as thousands of 'Soul Cleansing Nails' rained down from the sky. These specially designed weapons created an electronic force field covering several kilometres upon impact. Any living being experiencing emotional fluctuations who entered this field would feel the excruciating pain of their soul being forcibly torn apart.
'Ugh!' Aaryan groaned, dropping to one knee.
The purple-gold energy emanating from his right hand violently repelled the red force field. According to the underlying logic of ethereal punk, Aaryan's current anger had become a giant 'lightning rod', and the surrounding air thickened like mercury. Every inch of his skin felt as if it were being pierced by billions of silver needles.
"This feeling… they're extracting our consciousness!" Balthazar plunged his greatsword into the ground, barely managing to steady himself. His bloodshot eyes were fixed on the sky.
On both sides of the street, the demon race members who had been observing began to scream in agony. The etheric circuits within their bodies were overloaded by interference from the red force field. Without powerful royal divine consciousness to protect them as Aaryan's does, their bodies slowly began to "digitise" under a high-frequency vibration — a sign that their souls were being forcibly stripped away and transformed into pure data streams.
'Aaryan, no! This frequency is constantly adjusting!" Cyrus pounded frantically on the keyboard; the screen filled with gibberish. 'Malakor doesn't care about the lives of those enforcers. He's connected the entire city's power system to the "Soul Cleansing Circuit"! Every time you retaliate, the aftershocks speed up the 'formatting' process of your surrounding workers!'
This was a dead end.
Aaryan suddenly looked up and saw a young demon running towards him in terror. However, as he ran, the boy's legs had already turned into shattered, eerie green specks of light.
"Help me..." The boy's cry for help ceased abruptly, and he instantly disintegrated into a meaningless jumble of characters which were swept away by the suction port at the bottom of the 'Holy Judgement' in the sky.
'Beast!' Aaryan roared furiously, shooting a purple-gold flame into the sky and instantly obliterating a monitoring device overhead.
Just as he had predicted, an even stronger red light rebounded from the explosion of this attack, shattering windows in buildings within a hundred metres. Dozens of survivors were knocked unconscious by the shockwave, accelerating their disappearance.
'Look, my child.' Malakor's holographic projection appeared in mid-air, occupying half a wall. His face displayed a cruelty bordering on compassion. 'Your anger is nourishment; your resistance is the catalyst. The more you try to save them, the faster you kill. You are a Zero-One, born to end everything.'
Aaryan stopped attacking, his right hand trembling as the suppressed purple-gold light deepened and darkened.
"Hahahaha! This is royalty?"
A piercing metallic scraping sound rang out as the elite forces of the Holy Blood Council, the 'Silver Inquisitors', arrived. They wore heavy mercury armour that blocked sensory fluctuations and wielded ethereal halberds with blood-sucking grooves. Having had their emotions severed, they were completely unaffected by the Soul Cleansing Field.
One Inquisitor swung his halberd, its sharp tip slicing a deep wound revealing bone into Aaryan's shoulder. Purple-gold blood flowed out, burning in the air before hitting the ground.
Aaryan didn't retaliate; he simply gritted his teeth and used his body to shield Balthazar and Cyrus.
'Go ahead and hit me! Weren't you so cocky just now?' The Inquisitor sneered and kicked Aaryan hard in the chest again.
*Crack*.
That was the sound of a rib breaking. Like a kite with a broken string, Aaryan crashed through a section of the wall and was buried in rubble.
'Aaryan!' Balthazar tried to rush forward, but several Inquisitors used spirit-locking hooks to pin his shoulders and legs firmly in place.
'Don't... don't do that...' Struggling to his feet from the rubble, Aaryan's face was covered in blood, but his eyes were still bright, concealing an extreme level of restraint. 'Cyrus... how much longer...?'
'The frequency is too chaotic. I can't find the entry point for the 'silent code'." Tears streamed down Cyrus's face. 'The interference here is too strong. Unless someone can rush to the top of the clock tower and create a three-second 'city-wide vacuum'.
'Damn it.' Aaryan swayed as he stood up straight.
'Are you crazy?' Pau yelled from behind a pile of scrap metal. 'That's the most heavily guarded area, and your threshold is almost 99%! If you charge in with all your might, the resulting energy surge will incinerate everyone within a three-kilometre radius!'
'I won't use my full strength,' said Aaryan, wiping the blood from his face to reveal a ferocious and resolute smile. 'I'll use my "life" to fill the void.'
In fantasy terms, this is called 'Soul Burning'; in the Etherpunk system, it's called 'Self-Destructive Overclocking'.
He stopped releasing energy and concentrated all the purple-gold light within his marrow instead. His body began to crack from the extreme compression and the darkness no longer overflowed from him.
"Everyone, bow your heads."
Aaryan took his first step. At that very moment, the city's anger threshold jumped to 99.8%.
This was the darkest and most oppressive period, with no spectacular counterattacks. He stood within a hellish, crimson force field, covered in blood and with shattered bones. He endured countless halberds and bullets as he walked silently and incessantly towards the great clock tower that represented judgement.
Behind him was a long road paved with purple-gold bloodstains and ahead of him was the city's ultimate, despairing end.
In the shadow of the clock tower, Aaryan's footsteps were unusually heavy, each one accompanied by a grating, bone-grinding sound.
'Due to the target's refusal to cooperate, the "Final Purge" will be carried out.'
The Inquisitor's voice sounded mechanical and distorted beneath his mercury helmet. Four ethereal halberds simultaneously pierced Aaryan's abdomen and shoulder blades, pinning him to the dark blue stone wall of the clock tower. Purple-gold blood meandered along the cracks in the wall, forming a bizarre pattern that contrasted with the ancient wall etched with scorch marks from the 1969 fire.
In the holographic projection above the Maya district, Malakor let out a smug chuckle. 'It's over. So-called royal blood is nothing but a rotten debt from the old era. You will die here, your anger becoming the final fuel for the 'Soul Cleansing Circuit', thus activating the 'Primal Singularity'."
In the distance, Balthazar, crushed beneath the rubble, let out a desperate roar. Meanwhile, Cyrus's computer screen shattered from overload, the flames illuminating his dazed face. The entire city's population, separated by barbed wire and electronic fields, witnessed their last hope being nailed to the judgment seat.
The oppressive atmosphere was palpable; the air seemed to freeze.
Just as the inquisitor drew his halberd to deliver the final blow to Aaryan, however, a crisp 'beep' emanated from Aaryan's tattered sleeve.
It was a sensor that Cyrus had forcibly implanted under Aaryan's skin before his capture.
'Anger threshold: 100.00%."
'You've misunderstood one thing, Malakor.' Aaryan slowly raised his head. His eyes no longer held the previous rage, but rather a chilling tranquility — the stillness of the centre of a black hole. 'Anger is not my weakness, but my "compiler".'
The entire arena fell silent.
The colossal bronze bell at the top of the clock tower, which had been sealed for decades, trembled without warning. 'The Nullifier is not about ending life, but resetting all distorted rules to zero.' Aaryan's voice, amplified by the ethereal currents, echoed throughout the entire Maya District.
During that long period of passive torture, Aaryan was doing more than merely enduring it. He used the halberd piercing his body — the Inquisitor's spear tip — as a medium through which to transmit the unique 'deconstruction sequence' of his royal bloodline in reverse, via the city's power grid.
Every drop of his blood was a step towards breaking the spell.
'Indirectly: A miracle has occurred.'
In the deepest slums of the Maya District, an elderly demonic elder whose arms had become transparent and who was halfway through being 'formatted' suddenly felt the soul-rending pain vanish. Looking down, he saw the red force field covering his body dissolve rapidly like snow melting in hot water.
In its place were soft, purplish-golden spots of light.
'Look! The clouds in the sky!' someone exclaimed.
Thick smoke was now billowing from the massive red vent, which devoured souls, at the bottom of the Holy Judgment. The mechanical gears, which had previously been rotating in an orderly fashion, now began to reverse wildly and a piercing sound of cracking metal echoed from the clouds.
'This is impossible! My Soul Cleansing Circuit is perfect!' Malakor's holographic projection trembled violently. His true form atop the clock tower discovered in horror that all the monitoring panels displayed the same word: Reset. 'Now it's my turn.'
Aaryan suddenly reached out and grasped the invisible, ethereal threads in the void. The halberd that had pinned him instantly vaporised in the purplish-gold flames.
He no longer suppressed his emotions or held back.
Boom!
A massive, purplish-gold beam of light swept across the sky, emanating from the clock tower at its centre. This was not a destructive explosion, but a 'logical storm' that swept across the entire city. Wherever it passed, all electronic surveillance systems, force field generators and the mercury armour deployed by the Holy Blood Council instantly crumbled, reverting to basic metal parts and etheric particles.
Impacted by this immense force, the Holy Judgment Fortress was like a kite caught in a whirlwind; its stabilising wings snapped completely and it plummeted towards the sea outside the Maya District, trailing a long fiery tail.
Aaryan stood atop the clock tower. Behind him, the massive bronze bell finally roared for the first time in fifty years.
Dong!
The bell tolled and the extracted data streams of souls poured out from the ruins of the Holy Judgement, transforming into countless fireflies and returning to the bodies of the survivors.
Amidst the ruins, Aaryan's figure was enveloped in golden, ethereal light. He was no longer the helpless miner boy, but a god who had truly awoken and was walking through the cyber inferno.
He turned to face Malakor, who was trembling inside the clock tower's core, and looked at him coldly.
'Your threshold is full, Malakor.'
That night, the red light in the Maya district faded, replaced by an unprecedented purple-gold dawn belonging to the Demon Clan.
The aftershocks from the collapse of the clock tower were still reverberating through the metal pipes in the Maya district. Aaryan lay unconscious while Balthazar cleared the rubble and Pau scavenged for scraps in the ruins.
In the wreckage of the brass disc that Aaryan had crushed, there had once been a drive core known as the 'Crystal of Holy Blood'. While everyone's attention was focused on the opening 'Primordial Singularity', the softly golden bead had accidentally rolled into the arms of Pau, who was hiding in a ventilation duct and clutching his head.
'Is this a treasure worth half a city?' Pau wiped the cold sweat from his brow, chuckled and quickly stuffed the crystal into his greasy toolbox. 'Aaryan is the one in charge of saving the world. I, old Pau, am the one in charge of safeguarding these "heavy" assets for him. Perfect.'
Humming a slightly off-key tune, he nimbly navigated the Holy Blood Council's secret evacuation routes. However, this luck didn't last long. As he passed 'Gate Zero', which was sealed with forbidden runes at the deepest part of the factory, the crystal in his toolbox suddenly began to tremble violently.
A chilling wave, completely outside the etheric system, seeped from the crack in the gate and Pau froze. His prized 'Golden Left Hand', acutely sensitive to energy, began to convulse involuntarily. He slowly turned his head and peered through the crack created by steam pressure.
Instead of gold coins or energy, he saw a massive, beating metal heart — the very thing that had truly disappeared in the 1969 fire and had led to Malakor's 'liberation', even as his plans crumbled.
'My God...' Pau's teeth chattered. The light emanating from the crystal in his bag shifted instantly from gold to green, and then to an eerie green reminiscent of a corpse fire. Pau had taken the core, inadvertently activating the Blood Council's hidden 'Old God Compiler' after a century. While the entire city cheered for Aaryan's return, an ancient consciousness a thousand times more terrifying than Malakor was slowly awakening beneath the foundations of the Maya district under Pau's greedy gaze.