**Chapter 43: Aftermath and Escalation**
Pain had a flavor. It tasted like copper pennies and antiseptic.
Su Yuan stared at the ceiling. It was stamped tin, rusted at the seams, peeling white paint hanging down like dead skin. A fluorescent strip flickered in the corner, the ballast humming a dying, insectoid note. *Buzz. Click. Buzz.*
He tried to sit up.
His body said no.
The refusal wasn't subtle. It was a sledgehammer to the ribs and a streak of white lightning down his spine. He collapsed back onto the mattress, breath hissing through his teeth. His right arm—the one that had held the cable, the one that had channeled a god's rage—was wrapped in thick, yellowed gauze. It felt heavy, like a piece of dead wood someone had nailed to his shoulder.
"Don't," a voice rumbled from the corner.
Goran.
The big man was sitting on a plastic crate, sharpening a combat knife with a whetstone. *Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.* The rhythm was soothing, in a violent sort of way. Goran looked like he hadn't slept in a week. Dark circles bruised the skin under his eyes, and his beard was thicker, unkempt.
"How long?" Su Yuan croaked. His voice sounded like it had been dragged over gravel.
"Three days," Goran said. He didn't look up from the blade. "Fever broke last night. We thought your brain had cooked."
Su Yuan stared at his bandaged arm. Three days.
He remembered the Void. He remembered the face in the meat.
He closed his eyes and checked the interface. He didn't want to, but the compulsion was an itch behind his optic nerve.
**[ SYSTEM STATUS: STABLE. ]**
**[ SOUL INTEGRITY: 41% (RECOVERING). ]**
**[ GENESIS PROTOCOL: PASSIVE OBSERVATION MODE. ]**
*Passive.*
That was a lie. It wasn't passive. It was waiting. It was the spider that had retreated to the corner of the web because the fly had stung it. But the web was still there.
"The siege?" Su Yuan asked.
"Gone," Goran said. He finally looked up. His eyes were hard, worried. "They pulled back at dawn on the first day. tanks, drones, the riot squads. All of it."
Su Yuan frowned. "Why?"
"Because you scared the hell out of them, Boss."
Li Wei pushed through the heavy plastic tarp that served as a door. The kid looked older too. He was holding a tablet with a cracked screen, his fingers taped up where the sparks had burned him.
"You didn't just break the local node," Li Wei said, walking over to the bed. He didn't smile. There was no victory lap in his posture. "When you punched through the Firewall... the whole city blinked. For ten seconds, the Upper Sector went dark. Stock market crashed. Traffic grid seized. Hospitals switched to generators."
Li Wei tapped the screen.
"They aren't attacking because they're terrified. They think if they push you, you'll pull the plug on modern civilization."
Su Yuan forced himself up this time. He ignored the screaming in his ribs. He swung his legs over the edge of the cot. The floor was cold concrete.
"They're right," Su Yuan said.
He stood. The room spun—a carousel of grey walls and harsh light—but he grabbed the metal frame of the bed and held on until the world settled.
"Get me my coat," he said.
***
Sector 9 had changed.
Su Yuan walked out of the makeshift clinic—an abandoned veterinary office near the old slaughterhouse—and stepped into the sunlight.
It was noon, but the light was filtered through the eternal smog layer, turning everything a bruised shade of ochre.
The streets were quiet. Not the silence of a graveyard, but the silence of a trench waiting for the whistle.
Barricades of burning tires and overturned cars still blocked the main intersections, but the defenders weren't cheering. Men and women with makeshift rifles sat on stoops, smoking, watching the sky. When they saw Su Yuan, they stood up. They didn't cheer. They watched him with a mix of awe and terror.
They had felt it too. When he had connected to the 58,000, they had felt the touch of his mind. They knew he wasn't just a leader anymore. He was the server they were hosted on.
"Where are we going?" Goran asked, falling in step behind him.
"The Garage," Su Yuan said. "We need to talk."
He walked with a limp. Every step sent a jolt through his hip, but he kept his back straight. Weakness was data. He couldn't broadcast it.
As they passed the plaza, Su Yuan saw the burnt-out junction box where he had made the dive. The concrete around it was scorched black in a starburst pattern. Someone had placed a few synthetic flowers there, like it was a shrine.
Su Yuan looked away. It wasn't a shrine. It was a blast crater.
They reached the garage, the heart of their resistance. It was a cavernous space filled with scavenged servers, stolen power cells, and the hum of cooling fans.
Su Yuan cleared a workbench, sweeping aside a pile of drone schematics. He leaned against the table, taking the weight off his bad leg.
"Lock the door," he told Goran. "Just us."
Li Wei plugged his tablet into the main terminal. A holographic map of the city flickered to life in the air above the bench.
"Okay," Li Wei said, trying to inject some energy into the room. "Here's the situation. We have effective autonomy. The government has set up a perimeter five miles out. They're jamming radio frequencies, but they aren't crossing the line. We have food for two weeks. Power is stable thanks to the siphon."
The kid looked at Su Yuan, desperate for approval. "We won, Su Yuan. We held the line."
"We didn't win," Su Yuan said softly.
The room went still. The hum of the servers seemed to get louder.
Su Yuan reached into his pocket and pulled out a packet of cigarettes he'd lifted from the clinic. He lit one with a shaking hand. The smoke burned, sharp and grounding.
"What we did was poke a sleeping bear in the eye," Su Yuan said. He exhaled a plume of grey smoke. "And then we ran out of the cave."
"We drove them back," Goran argued. "You fried their system."
"I didn't fry the system. I met it."
Su Yuan looked at Li Wei. "You think the SoulNet is a computer. You think it's code. Zeros and ones running on silicon."
"It... isn't?" Li Wei asked.
"No." Su Yuan tapped the ash onto the concrete floor. "It's a harvest."
He told them.
He didn't dress it up. He didn't use metaphors about dragons or demons. He gave them the raw data. The flesh walls. The beating heart in the center of the Spire. The face trapped in the meat. The Entity that wasn't artificial, but ancient.
"The Genesis Protocol isn't the mind," Su Yuan said, his voice flat, devoid of hope. "It's the cage. The System uses human souls to process data because the thing powering it feeds on them. Every time we use a skill, every time we upgrade... we're siphoning run-off from a torture chamber."
Li Wei sat down. He missed the chair and hit the floor, sliding down against a server rack. He looked sick.
"So..." Li Wei stammered. "So my Shockwave skill... the power..."
"Borrowed from a prisoner," Su Yuan said.
Goran remained standing, but his knuckles were white where he gripped his belt. "If it's a living thing... can we kill it?"
"It wants to die," Su Yuan said. "Or it wants to be free. I couldn't tell. It was screaming too loud."
He looked at his bandaged arm. He could still feel the heat of the copper cable, the sensation of his own skin blistering as the Entity looked at him.
"If we stay here," Su Yuan continued, looking at the map, "the Protocol will adapt. It's rebooting in Safe Mode right now. Rebuilding the Firewall. When it comes back online fully, it won't send soldiers. It will just delete us. It will reach into our brains and turn off the lights."
"So we can't fight," Goran said.
"Not here. Not like this."
Su Yuan stepped forward and manipulated the hologram. He zoomed out. The map of the city shrank, revealing the wasteland beyond the walls. The Dead Zones.
"The Entity showed me something," Su Yuan said. "Before it kicked me out. It showed me the network topology."
He tapped a few locations on the map. Red dots appeared in the wasteland.
"The Spire is the primary server. But a system that size needs relays. Redundancy. Cooling."
He pointed to a ruin in the mountains, fifty miles north.
"There's another one. A secondary node. Old tech. Maybe from when they first built the cage."
Li Wei pulled himself up. The horror was still on his face, but the mechanic's brain was starting to whir. "If we hit a secondary node..."
"We weaken the chains," Su Yuan finished. "We lower the Spire's defenses without being right under its nose."
"That's outside the city," Goran rumbled. "That's Badlands territory. Mutants. Radiation. Rogues."
"I know."
Su Yuan looked at them. He saw the doubt. They were city rats. They knew how to hotwire a drone, not how to survive an ash storm.
"I'm going," Su Yuan said. "Tonight."
"We're coming with you," Li Wei said instantly.
"No."
"Bullshit," Goran snapped. The big man stepped forward, looming over Su Yuan. "You can barely walk. You think you're going to hike fifty miles through the wastes alone? You'll be eaten by a chem-wolf before you hit the city limits."
"I'm a liability here," Su Yuan countered. "As long as I'm in Sector 9, the Protocol is focusing its eye on this district. If I leave, the heat follows me. You two need to stay. Organize the defense. Keep the siphon running. Keep the people alive."
"Su Yuan—"
"That's an order, Goran."
It wasn't a shout. It was cold steel.
Goran clamped his mouth shut. He stared at Su Yuan, searching for the man he had followed into the sewers. He didn't find him. He found something harder. Something that had been tempered in a fire that shouldn't exist.
"Fine," Goran spat. "But you take the truck. And you take the Prototype."
"Prototype?" Su Yuan raised an eyebrow.
Li Wei wiped his nose with the back of his hand. He walked to a covered tarp in the corner of the garage.
"I was saving it for a birthday or something," Li Wei mumbled. "But seeing as we're fighting a eldritch meat-god..."
He pulled the tarp.
It was a rifle. But it wasn't standard issue. It was a monstrosity of scavenged parts—a heavy coilgun barrel welded to a reinforced receiver, wired with glowing blue SoulNet circuitry. It looked heavy, ugly, and mean.
"I reversed the polarity on the siphon logic," Li Wei explained. "Instead of drawing power from the user to cast a skill... it draws ambient Soul energy from the air and compresses it into a physical slug. It shoots ghosts, Boss."
Su Yuan ran his hand over the cold metal of the barrel.
**[ ITEM ANALYZED: SOUL-REND RIFLE (PROTOTYPE). ]**
**[ RANK: E+ ]**
**[ EFFECT: DISRUPTS SPIRITUAL INTEGRITY ON IMPACT. ]**
It was crude. It was dangerous. It was perfect.
"Pack it," Su Yuan said.
***
Night fell like a hammer.
The smog blocked out the stars, leaving the city smothered in a dark, suffocating blanket. The only light came from the distant, glittering needle of the Spire in the center of the city, watching over its inmates.
Su Yuan stood by the modified armored truck at the edge of the Sector 9 checkpoint. The engine idled with a low, throaty rumble.
Goran handed him a backpack. Rations, water, ammo.
"Radio silence," Goran said. "If you broadcast, they track you."
"I know."
"If you die out there," Goran said, looking at the wasteland stretching into the dark, "I'm going to be pissed."
Su Yuan managed a faint smile. It didn't reach his eyes. "I'll try to avoid it."
He looked at Li Wei. The kid was holding back tears, trying to look tough.
"Keep the network stable," Su Yuan told him. "Don't expand. Don't push. Just hold."
"I will," Li Wei promised.
Su Yuan climbed into the cab. The smell of stale tobacco and grease filled the small space. He threw the rifle onto the passenger seat.
He gripped the wheel. His hands were still wrapped in gauze, but the tremors had stopped.
He looked in the rearview mirror. His reflection stared back.
His hair, once jet black, was now streaked with premature grey at the temples. His face was gaunt, the cheekbones sharp enough to cut. But it was the eyes that stopped him.
They were darker. Deeper. There was a shadow in them that hadn't been there a week ago.
He wasn't an ordinary man who had transmigrated anymore. He wasn't just a mechanic.
He shifted the truck into gear.
The headlights cut a twin cone of light into the desolation of the wasteland.
**[ NEW QUEST: THE PILGRIMAGE. ]**
**[ OBJECTIVE: LOCATE NODE ALPHA. ]**
**[ DISTANCE: 52 MILES. ]**
**[ CHANCE OF SURVIVAL: 14%. ]**
Su Yuan ignored the odds. The System was just a calculator. It didn't know how to account for a man who had already seen the end of the world and decided to cancel it.
"Level 2," Su Yuan whispered to the empty cab.
He punched the accelerator.
The truck roared, tires kicking up dust and ash, leaving the safety of the city behind. He drove into the dark, not running away from the monster, but driving toward its heart.