The air in the sewer smelled like a corpse that had been left to rot for centuries.
Lu Jin lay wedged inside a dried-out drainpipe, moss under him sticky as dead skin. Three hours of sleep—that was what he'd just had.
His most luxurious night in the last six months.
The lingering warmth from [Life Incubator (II)] was pulling back, tide going out and leaving bare rock. The pain in his spine came back with it, all steel needles and raw nerves, sharpened by the brief mercy.
He didn't move.
He stared into the dark while the system's cold blue interface hovered over his retina.
[ —Deep Space Echo · Host Resource Panel— ][ Host: Lu Jin ][ Life Grade: D- (Critical) ][ Cash Account: ¥1,500.10 ][ Holy Resonance Pool (Reality): 27 points (Available) ][ Life Remaining: 64 hours 15 minutes 09 seconds ]
His gaze skipped the timer.
He focused on the feed in the middle of the display—the wasteland live stream.
—
The storm had passed.
After Class B "Acid Bite" swept through, the northern stretch of A-11 looked like someone had scrubbed it with lye. Snow lay in a flat sheet, topped by a thin layer of black dust, like a burn scar across the whole landscape.
S-09 "Big Yellow" crouched in front of a half-buried ruin. The S-class slaughter machine, usually a walking nightmare, now moved with a kind of frantic anxiety. Its hydraulic foreclaws raked at the frozen ground in short, jerky strikes.
Not digging for loot.
Digging like a spooked dog trying to bury itself.
"Creak—"
Its single optic flashed between yellow and red. A low mechanical moan rolled out of its throat, the sound of an old generator being forced to run past its limit.
"What's wrong, Big Yellow?" Li Xing crawled out of the camping pod, the "Thunderstorm" nail gun still in her hands. She swept a wary look around the white plain. Radar was clean. Not even a mutant rat.
Big Yellow ignored her.
It slammed its head into the half-collapsed concrete wall. Snow and chunks of masonry shook loose and slid aside.
A rust-scabbed metal plate emerged from beneath the grime.
The acid rain had scarred the alloy, but the material itself was aerospace-grade. The etched lettering remained sharp enough to cut.
[ Federal Extreme-North Science Outpost · Acoustic Test Substation No. 4 ][ Affiliation: Project Babel · S-Class Restricted Zone ][ Warning: Bio-Contamination Area · No Unauthorized Entry ]
Li Xing tilted her head, staring at the logo—a spiral tower drilling into the sky.
She didn't know the words, but something under her skin went cold.
"Ba… bel…?" she sounded it out, stumbling over each syllable.
Big Yellow went very still.
It pressed its huge metal head against the plate, that cyclopean eye dimming all the way to a lifeless gray. Standby mode. Like it had lain back down in the factory it came from, waiting to be stripped for parts.
"I smell something," Li Xing muttered.
She drew in a breath.
Not rot. Something sharper. The bite of preservative, undercut by the stink of burnt circuit boards.
Formaldehyde and scorched electronics.
She didn't back off.
The "oracle" pointed north. This ruin sat right across their path.
Li Xing slid through the crack in the wall.
—
In the sewer, Lu shot upright.
Pain tore across his chest; he caught himself on a cough, the sound punching out of him with a low grunt.
He knew that logo.
Five years ago, in his father's study, a classified file had sat on the desk for one night too long before it was destroyed. The cover carried that same mark.
[ Project Babel ]
The Federation's last insane bet at the end of the old age. They'd tried to build a bridge to higher dimensions using specific acoustic frequencies, hoping to counter the AI uprising that was coming.
The brightest, dirtiest branch buried in that stack had a simple name.
[ Sacred Song Project ]
"Shit," Lu whispered.
His fingers dug into the ghost of a keyboard, knuckles tightening.
He wanted to slam a warning across the feed, tell Li Xing to get out, now—but his hand stopped halfway.
Because she was already bending down.
She'd found something on the floor.
A black block, roughly the size of a brick. Hardened storage. A dead hand clung to it, fingers shriveled to brown bone. What remained of the corpse wore a torn lab coat. The chest badge read:
[ Project Babel · Senior Researcher · Li— ]
Li Xing pried each brittle finger off the drive, wincing as the digits cracked.
The moment she freed it, Lu's interface exploded with a familiar brand of cheerful ugliness.
[ Shock! Wasteland Scavenger Hits the Jackpot! ][ S-Class Classified Archive Source Detected (Encrypted)! ][ Wanna know what kind of secrets are buried in this haunted ruin? Want to know which assembly line your "daughter" rolled off of? ][ Original Price: ¥1,999.00 ][ Family-Bond Repair Price: ¥199.00! Miss it now, cry later, sweetie~ ]
Bloodshot color crept into Lu's vision.
"Charging for a dead man's secrets now?" His voice came out flat. "You really don't believe in karma."
He still didn't hesitate.
"Pay."
[ Ding! Transaction complete. ][ Deducted: -¥199.00 ][ Audio Decryption in Progress… Playback Starting. ]
—
In the ruin, the dead black brick flickered.
A dull red indicator light blinked on. A skitter of electrical noise crackled through the wide, empty hall, then a woman's voice cut in, too smooth, too even.
"Log number: Babel-704."
"Seventh-phase tower experiment. Total gene-edited embryos: 1,200. Post-screening, three survivors."
"Test results: Sample 7-01. Vocal cord elasticity insufficient. High-frequency range triggers cerebral hemorrhage. Disposed. Sample 7-02. Divine-resonance ratio 0.01%. Useless."
"Sample 7-03…"
A pause. Pages turning.
"Survived, but vocal purity below threshold. Cannot bear high-dimensional echo. Recommendation: Process as 'wetware' stock. Remove frontal lobe, integrate into S-class mech as biological processor. Alternatively… ship to North Star main station. Add to choir array as single-use fuel."
"Wait, Director Li."
A man's voice in the background. Hoarse, tired, edged with a helplessness Lu knew far too well.
"Don't go that far. Experimental subject or not… it's still a child. Can we file for retention as an observation sample? Even if it's… dumped into the wasteland and left to fend for itself?"
The woman let out a short, cold laugh.
"Engineer Lu, keep your pity to yourself. We're building a tower. Making gods. Not running an orphanage. Cut out the throats that can't sing. Send the rest to North Star. Only 'Zero' is perfect. The others are bricks for the base."
"Zzzz—"
The recording dissolved in a burst of noise and cut off.
—
Silence flooded the ruin.
Li Xing stood there, the drive cupped in her hands. The wind had died, but she stood as if listening for another word.
She couldn't parse the jargon. "Project Babel." "Wetware." "Choir array."
But she understood the tone in that man's voice—the way he'd spoken when he'd said "child."
And she understood the woman when she said "cut out."
Her hand crept to her own throat. The skin there throbbed, phantom pain blooming along a line only she could feel.
"Listener…" she whispered, eyes searching the ceiling. "Were they… singers before? The ones in the story?"
"What are they cutting? Why do they have to go to North Star?"
—
In the pipe, Lu's fingers carved into rusty metal, skin breaking, blood spreading along the seams.
His whole body shook.
That voice.
That hoarse, exhausted man in the log—"Engineer Lu."
Lu Yuanshan.
The father who'd always seemed gentle, who brought cheap birthday cake home when he got a bonus, who'd sat at the kitchen table and taught him how to do calculus.
The man had been at the core of this madness called Babel.
And Li Xing…
Lu stared at her face on the screen. Her open expression. The way she tiptoed around ruins because she didn't want to step on bones.
She wasn't some random awakened talent.
She'd been manufactured.
One of 1,200 edited fetuses. A piece of scaffolding that slipped through the cracks. A girl who should've had her frontal lobe scooped out and jammed into Big Yellow's skull as a component—or been shipped to North Star to burn out her voice as fuel.
North Star.
Not a promised land.
A tower carcass. A broadcast cannon built to scream at higher dimensions, powered by children like her.
Lu's stomach rolled. Acid crawled up his throat; he doubled over and gagged, bringing up nothing but sour spit.
So that's the truth?
That's the great "savior" system?
"You knew," he said, staring into the dark, voice low. "You knew from the start. You've been guiding her back to the furnace."
Deep Space Echo didn't answer.
Only its logo pulsed in the corner, the little icon flickering faster, as if amused.
On the feed, Li Xing still waited.
She held the drive like a cursed relic, not knowing whether to cling to it or drop it.
Tell her?
Tell her she was scrap? That the "oracle" she believed in was a one-way ticket to a crematorium?
Lu shut his eyes.
The pain in his nerves kept him from doing something stupid.
He raised his hand and, using the rusty old keyboard as a phantom, typed a line into the app's live overlay.
[ Old fairy-tale broadcast. About a witch in a tower that eats kids. ]
[ Lousy story. Don't listen. Throw it away. ]
[ We're going to North Star to kill the witch. ]
—
On the ruin feed, the golden subtitles popped up in Li Xing's vision.
She let out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding.
"So it's a story…" She patted her chest. The fear in her face fell away in an instant, replaced by something almost sheepish. "I knew it. There can't be people that awful."
"Listener is right. That story sucks."
She swung her arm back and hurled the drive.
It hit the wall and burst into pieces. Shards of housing and cracked boards slid into the dust. The words "Project Babel," "cut," "fuel," got buried under rubble like they'd never existed.
Li Xing turned away, shoulders squaring.
She hitched the nail gun back into place.
"Big Yellow! Up!" She kicked the side of S-09's tread. "We're going to beat the witch!"
Big Yellow's optic flickered twice, then came back online in a firm red glow. Whatever had spooked it seemed to slip off. It let out a low mechanical grunt, obedient as a massive, dangerous dog.
Only the corroded plate stayed where it was, half-buried in snow, watching this clueless little procession march north.
—
Lu watched her go.
His mouth twisted into something that wanted to be a laugh and failed halfway.
He'd lied.
He'd swallowed every ugly piece of truth and left it down there in the dark with him.
Up top, the chapter became a fairy tale.
Down here, it went septic.
The interface shuddered.
The feed stuttered, lines tearing across his vision, the picture breaking into blocks and snow.
[ Warning: Abnormal phase interference detected. ][ Source Lock: Extreme North · North Star Main Station. ][ Song Source ID-03 awakening. ][ Recalculating Area Hazard… ][ Hazard Level Correction: SSS-Class. ][ Note: It is hungry. ]
Lu's pupils tightened.
ID-03.
The one the recording had brushed against. The survivor after "Zero." Not just fuel. Something that had been allowed to grow teeth.
Waiting on the tower for Li Xing to walk up and knock.
"Wants to eat her, huh?"
Lu rubbed the bridge of his nose where his glasses used to sit, eyes gone flat.
He called up a window he hadn't opened before.
[ S-09 Mech · Project Babel Low-Level Protocol Backdoor (Inactive) ][ Status: Locked. Specific acoustic key required. ]
"Then let's see who's feeding who."
He yanked his makeshift network cable free of the sewer wall.
Footsteps rattled the manhole above him. Heavy. Measured.
The hound had finally followed his scent.
"Good timing."
Lu's hand closed around the grip of his battered Glock 19.
He slid deeper into the black, all warmth gone from his face, leaving nothing behind his eyes but calculation and a very simple promise.
If something at North Star wanted to eat his "brick," it was going to choke on the first bite.