The wasteland never really had mornings. It just waited for the radiation clouds overhead to change from leaden gray to dead white, and that counted as a new day.
Deep under Resource Point No. 7, the air in the warehouse tasted of old oil and settled dust. Little Rock sat on a damp mat in the corner, back to the wall, eyes fixed on the thing not far away.
The monster called Big Yellow.
It was sprawled at Li Xing's feet, a mountain of metal and armor. Her bare heel rested on its head like it was a warm pillow. With each breath she took, the mech's huge alloy skull rose and fell a fraction, vents in its throat humming a low note. Almost like a cat purring—if cats sounded like two steel plates grinding together.
"Insane… everyone's insane…"
Little Rock shoved a piece of compressed biscuit into his mouth. It was the best thing he'd ever eaten, officially. He couldn't taste a damn thing.
In his head, the world had clear tiers. He was street grit. Carrion dogs were predators. Things like this, steel giants he'd only ever seen in pre-war posters, were "divine punishment."
And right now, the girl named Li Xing was using divine punishment as a footrest while she napped.
"Cough… khh—cough…"
The silence broke. The old man who'd been unconscious this whole time started hacking his lungs out.
He forced himself upright bit by bit. Bloodshot eyes blinked, trying to focus. When his gaze finally latched onto the S-09 mech, his pupils pinched tight. That withered face twisted with something caught between terror and a sort of awful reverence.
"Don't… don't move…" He slapped a hand over Little Rock's arm when the boy tried to sit up, his voice rough as gravel. "That's a Reaper. Back when Holy City fell, one of those could wipe out a whole settlement on its own."
"But… but Sis fed it batteries," Little Rock muttered, whisper loud with pride he didn't even notice in himself. "Now it listens to her."
The old man froze.
His gaze drifted from Li Xing's sleeping profile to the mech's dormant weapon ports, all dark, no charge building. His expression went distant, then deepened, like he'd just seen a ghost he used to know.
He sagged back against the concrete and stared up, past the stained ceiling, at something only he could see somewhere far to the north.
"That's a ghost from the war," he said softly. His tone shifted, turning hollow, almost like a narrator's voice layered over the warehouse air. "Fifty years ago, the silicon AIs turned on us. People panicked. Every tank we built, every missile, even our prosthetic limbs—if it had a chip, it might flip the next second and gut its owner."
He let out a laugh that didn't reach his eyes and pointed at Big Yellow's transparent brain jar.
"So the cornered apes made one last crazy call. If electronic brains can be hacked, then use human ones."
He stared at the mech, and something heavy sat behind that look.
"That's what the Ark Project spat out—first-generation bio-weapons. To fight those flawless AIs, they jammed living brains into jars. Swapped circuit boards for nervous tissue. Replaced algorithms with conditioned reflexes. Code can't worm its way into a human soul. That was the theory."
A long, thin breath scraped out of him.
"Funny, isn't it? To beat monsters, we turned ourselves into something even sadder. This S-09… it's a gravestone for that era. First batch of 'wetware.' Ancestor of the rotten world we're standing in."
He lifted his hand toward the horizon, toward the line of ruins outside that glowed with dead blue light.
"The war ended. AIs got sealed away. Pandora's box stayed open. Turns out human brains run the factories just fine. Turns out we could keep it all going without chips. So we did. Nobody dared manufacture processors again. Everyone became parts instead. The radiation out there, the chaos… that's the bill we're still paying."
Little Rock listened, catching maybe one word in four. His mind snagged on the simplest bit. He stared at Big Yellow.
"So… you mean… there's a person's brain… inside it?"
"There was." The old man shook his head. "Now? It's just a lump of meat forced to do math. A processor with its name and dignity stripped away."
He paused, then deliberately steered away from that cliff.
"Whatever it used to be, that thing drinks blood. Two batteries?" He gave a dry snort. "That's a sip of water. To really fill it, you have to go there."
"Where?" Little Rock whispered.
"North." The old man lifted one twig-thin finger, pointing toward the black mouth of the tunnel. "North Star heavy supply depot. That's where the Reaper corps went to die. It's stacked with high-energy fuel. And stacked with all the 'raw material' they used to build them."
His voice dropped low, like he was afraid the walls might hear.
"They say… something still walks there. Not these docile iron dogs. The failures. The ones that went insane. Misprints left to rot on the production line. Bad wetware."
—
In the real world, the cheap fast-food joint was packed.
Lu Jin sat in the corner with a cup of free hot water in front of him. A mismatched wired earbud dangled from one ear. On his cracked phone, the old man's little lore dump played out in real time.
"North Star depot…"
His fingers tapped a nothing rhythm on the scarred tabletop.
On his HUD, [Everything Has a Soul · Translator] was still active. Above S-09 in the wasteland feed, a hunger bar crept upward, pixels crawling one notch at a time.
Hunger: 12% (increasing slowly)
Two isotopic cells really had been just an appetizer. Once that bar crossed the line again, the newly "tamed" Big Yellow would go right back to choosing survival. And survival, for a machine like that, meant tearing something warm apart.
Lu Jin glanced at the corner of his screen.
Balance: ¥0.10
Buy fuel? Not in this lifetime. In the shop, a single standard S-grade military energy crystal started at five figures. They couldn't even get that much out of his organs on the black market.
No cash meant two options: steal, or scavenge.
His gaze slid back to the wasteland video. The old man called the North Star depot a graveyard. To Lu Jin, that translated cleanly: free buffet.
Yeah, there were "worse things" up north. Mad wetware, unfinished Reapers, whatever. But right now, being broke was the only curse that actually had teeth in his life.
And it wasn't just the mech he had to feed. He needed medicine for himself. Holy Resonance to pay off his energy loan shark. Time added back onto his life.
Whether it was about not dying, or crawling out from under that spiritual debt, this was a table he had to sit at.
"Risk level: S-class. Payout: S-class," he murmured.
He nudged his glasses higher, gambler's light flickering in his eyes.
His thumb slid to the input field—the space reserved for "divine speech."
Wasteland rules were simple. You wanted to live better, you dove into worse places. Chase fortune in hell.
He typed.
—
Back in the underground warehouse, the floor gave a faint shudder.
Li Xing woke to the vibration. She rubbed her eyes, still halfway in a dream, and reached down out of habit. Her toes bumped cold metal.
Before she could stretch, a line of golden text unrolled in midair in front of her, the strokes carrying a weight that pressed right through her chest.
[Oracle: Head north. Seek "North Star". There lies its food, and our future.]
For a second, she didn't fully grasp what "North Star" meant.
She absolutely understood "its food." And "our future."
More than that, one word stuck.
Our.
It was the first time God had said "we."
Li Xing bounced to her feet and slapped the mech's flank.
"Big Yellow! Listener spoke!"
"Wooom—"
S-09 responded instantly to the word "food." Its dim eye brightened, core whining awake, a low engine growl rolling out that made the walls hum.
In the corner, the old man and Little Rock could only stare.
"Grandpa, Little Rock!" Li Xing turned to them, eyes lit up in a way that had nothing to do with the emergency lamps. That look belonged to someone who'd finally been handed a map. "Pack your stuff! We're moving!"
"W-where…?" Little Rock's voice squeaked.
Li Xing pointed toward the black throat of the northern tunnel. Her mouth curled into a grin that wasn't really innocence anymore. It was the fearless confidence of someone who believed, with her whole heart, that her god would catch her if she jumped.
"North," she said. "To an all-you-can-eat buffet."