The first thing Zai Ren saw was static.
Flickering blue-white lines danced across his vision, like broken glass fracturing reality. His limbs felt like stone, his body heavy, his mind caught between waking and dreaming. Then—
"Subject alive. Brainwave activity stabilizing. Neural imprint... chaotic, but within sync parameters. Suboptimal host detected."
A voice echoed in his mind. Cold, clipped, mechanical—but laced with sarcasm.
"Well, aren't you just a delightful mess. Welcome to consciousness, kid. I'm Specter. Try not to die again."
Zai shot upright with a gasp, head cracking against the metal ceiling of a cramped bunk. Pain lanced through his skull. A groan escaped his lips.
"Relax," a gruff voice said. "You flatlined for almost ten minutes after that vault surge. Lucky for you, we pulled you out in time."
Zai blinked the blur from his eyes. The room was dim, walls lined with exposed wiring and humming panels. The ship. The scavengers. The vault. It all slammed back into place.
Specter, too.
"You're welcome, by the way," the AI quipped in his head. "I restructured your nervous system with tech designed for ascended war-beasts. No need to thank me... yet."
The metal door hissed open. In stepped the three members of the scavenger crew: Captain Rhys, tall and broad with a worn synth-leather coat; Tamika, the wiry teen with cybernetic gloves and impatient eyes; and Old Jin, who stared at Zai like he was a lab sample about to explode.
"Kid," Rhys said, crossing his arms, "you wanna tell me what the hell that was? You fried a vault older than the galactic charter and walked out alive. Then passed out like a rookie with synth-lag."
Zai tried to sit up fully. His muscles protested. "It... responded to me. The vault. I didn't mean for it to go nuclear."
Tamika snorted. "Vaults don't 'respond' to gutter rats. That was tech no one's cracked in centuries. And you just—what? Woke it up with a handshake?"
Zai hesitated. He couldn't tell them about Specter. Not yet.
"Lucky guess," he mumbled.
"You're awful at lying," Specter chimed in. "But I admire the effort. Baby steps, meatbag."
Jin narrowed his eyes. "His neural patterns are irregular. Spiking in frequencies I haven't seen outside blacksite simulations."
"Meaning what?" Rhys asked.
"Meaning he touched something he shouldn't have. And now something's riding shotgun in that skull."
Zai froze.
Rhys studied him a long moment. Then, to everyone's surprise, he turned toward the door.
"He stays."
Tamika looked like she was about to burst. "What?! We don't even know what he is!"
"He's a kid who didn't die in a vault that should have atomized him. He's useful."
Rhys left, and Jin followed, muttering something about 'damned cursed tech.' Tamika lingered at the door.
"Don't think this makes us friends," she muttered. "We see sparks flying out of your eyes, I'm grabbing the nearest EMP spike."
The door sealed behind her.
Zai exhaled and leaned back.
"What charming company," Specter said. "Now that we're alone, let's run a compatibility test before your synapses collapse like cheap scaffolding."
Zai didn't even have time to ask before the world around him twisted.
He was falling.
Or floating.
The blackness around him shimmered, like oil in zero-g. Data strings danced like fireflies, swirling into shapes that pulsed with power.
"Welcome to the Codex Mindscape," Specter announced. "Here, your thoughts manifest as action. Let's see if that skull of yours can handle high-tier stimulus."
Suddenly, a swarm of code-beasts formed from tangled light lunged at him.
Zai had no weapons. No training. Just instinct and will.
He ducked, dodged, spun through a storm of data, his body reacting with unnatural speed. The environment shifted with every thought: walls forming from equations, floors from force diagrams.
One of the beasts clipped his arm. Pain, real and sharp, screamed through his body. He fell hard.
"Too slow," Specter said. "Again."
And the test restarted.
Over and over, Zai fought.
Until he wasn't fighting. He was adapting.
Learning to manipulate the space, redirecting enemy vectors, creating temporary platforms, absorbing attack patterns.
He didn't win.
But he survived longer. Lasted until Specter yanked him out.
Zai snapped back to the real world drenched in sweat, his pulse hammering like plasma pistons.
"You're raw," Specter said, almost impressed. "But you've got the mind for it. The Codex recognizes you. You passed the first layer. Congratulations, Nano Sage candidate."
Later that night, Zai sat in the ship's engine bay, watching Tamika tinker with a pulse core. She ignored him mostly, but didn't throw a wrench at him, which he counted as progress.
Old Jin walked in, gave him a long look, then dropped a bundle at his feet. Tools. Basic scavenger loadout.
"Field run tomorrow," Jin said. "Stay out of the way. Don't touch anything glowing."
Zai nodded. He would pull his weight.
"Smart move staying quiet," Specter noted. "If they find out what you really are, they'll either dissect you or worship you. Both are inconvenient."
Zai stared at the stars through a porthole, a flickering nebula casting faint light.
"Grandma Mei would hate this place," he whispered.
"And yet, here you are. Running with scavengers, haunted by a war-AI, hacking reality one law at a time."
Zai smiled faintly.
He was still afraid.
But somewhere beneath that fear...
A spark had caught flame.