The sky above the Junkyard was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel—static grey, occasionally interrupted by the jagged, neon-blue scar of a server discharge from the Upper Realm.
Kai adjusted the filtration rag over his nose, narrowing his eyes against the stinging grit of the Outer Shell. Here, in the ass-end of the Heavenly Circuit, the air tasted of ozone and despair.
"Atmospheric scrubbing at 12% efficiency," a digitized voice crackled from a nearby speaker pole, the audio glitching. "P-p-praise the Divine Silicon Sect for their... benevolence."
Kai ignored it. He ignored the flickering holograms of celestial maidens advertising 'Nirvana-Brand Neural Chips.' He ignored the groans of the 'Modded' addicts huddled in the alleyways, their cheap chrome limbs twitching as they experienced withdrawal from the System's bandwidth.
He moved with the silence of a ghost, his boots—scavenged from a dead factory worker—making no sound on the rusted metal grating that served as the ground. Below him, through the gaps in the grate, was the void. Not the poetic void of the Taoists, but the literal, freezing vacuum of space, separated from the slum only by a failing energy shield.
Kai was a scavenger. A rat. But mostly, he was a ghost.
He was a Null.
He reached up and touched the back of his neck. Smooth skin. No cold metal. No input jack. No blinking LED status light. In a world where 99% of humanity was plugged into the Heaven Server, receiving their daily allotment of Qi and propaganda directly into their cerebral cortex, Kai was disconnected. Offline.
To the System, he was an error. To the corporations, he was waste.
Beep.
His wrist-scanner, a chunky, jury-rigged device he'd built from scrap, vibrated.
"Signal detected," Kai whispered, his voice hoarse. "Sector 4. Fresh dump."
He looked up. Far above the smog and the towering heaps of trash, he could see the curve of the world. The Heavenly Circuit wasn't a planet; it was a massive Dyson Swarm, a cage of metal and light trapping a dying star. The 'Sun' was just a massive fusion battery for the Immortals in the Core.
And sometimes, the Immortals threw their trash out the window.
A 'Star-Fall' had occurred three hours ago. A cargo container from the Middle Ring had malfunctioned and plummeted into the Junkyard. If Kai was fast, he could salvage enough processors to pay for Rin's meds for another week. If he was slow, the Scavenger Gangs would skin him alive for the sport of it.
He broke into a run, vaulting over a pile of corroded coolant pipes.
Unlike the cultivators, Kai couldn't circulate Qi to lighten his body. He couldn't download a 'Swift Wind Step' algorithm to increase his speed. He had to rely on biology. Muscle, bone, adrenaline. The ancient, inefficient hardware of a base human.
He slid under a hanging mass of wires, the copper tips sparking inches from his face, and dropped into a crater formed by the impact.
The container was there. It was stamped with the logo of Azure Bio-Systems: a blue double-helix wrapped around a lotus flower.
"Jackpot," Kai muttered, pulling a crowbar from his belt.
The container was breached, smoke pouring from its side. Inside, the shelves were overturned. Vials of glowing blue liquid lay shattered on the floor—nutrient paste for high-tier body cultivators. Useless now.
But Kai wasn't looking for paste. He was looking for hardware.
He rummaged through the debris, his hands moving with practiced efficiency. Burnt circuit boards. Cracked screens. Then, his fingers brushed against something cold and heavy.
A neural drive. Military grade.
Kai's heart hammered against his ribs. This single drive, even damaged, was worth more than his life. It could buy Rin a ticket to a clinic in the Lower Ring. It could buy hope.
He snatched it up, shoving it into his deep pocket.
"Well, well," a voice sneered, the sound modulated by a cheap vocal synthesizer. "Look what the garbage spawned."
Kai froze. He didn't turn around. He calculated the distance to the exit: twenty meters. Obstacles: three piles of debris. Probability of outrunning a Hardware Forge Stage cultivator: less than 5%.
He slowly turned.
Standing on the rim of the crater were three men. They wore leather jackets studded with glowing diodes. The leader, a man with a jaw replaced entirely by a rusted hydraulic clamp, grinned. His eyes were red camera lenses that zoomed in and out with a soft whir.
Iron-Jaw. A lieutenant of the Copper Vipers gang.
"A Null," Iron-Jaw laughed, the hydraulic piston in his cheek hissing. "I didn't think you defects survived this deep in the sector."
"Just passing through," Kai said, his posture relaxed, though every muscle was coiled tight. "Didn't find anything. Just trash."
"My sensors detected a Grade-B energy signature," Iron-Jaw said, stepping down into the crater. The metal ground groaned under his weight. He had clearly cultivated the Iron Body Script—his skin had a metallic sheen, heavy and dense. "Empty your pockets, defect. Or I'll rip your arms off and sell them for meat."
Kai's hand tightened around the crowbar behind his back. It was a piece of rebar, sharpened at one end. Against a cultivator whose skin was literally iron, it was a toothpick.
But Kai had something they didn't. He had the desperation of the unconnected.
"I said," Iron-Jaw barked, raising a heavy hand. Qi—visible as faint, glowing binary code—began to swirl around his fist. "Empty them!"
Kai threw the crowbar.
Not at Iron-Jaw, but at the sparking fuse box hanging precariously above the gangster's head.
Clang.
The bar hit the box. Sparks showered down, igniting the leaking coolant gas from the crashed container.
BOOM.
A wall of white fire erupted between them.
"Glitch!" Iron-Jaw roared, shielding his optical sensors from the flare.
Kai didn't wait. He scrambled up the opposite side of the crater, his lungs burning as he inhaled the acrid smoke. He didn't look back. He ran until his legs felt like lead, weaving through the labyrinth of the Junkyard, diving through tunnels too small for the bulky, modded gangsters to follow.
He didn't stop until he reached the rusted airlock of his 'home'—a repurposed shipping container welded to the side of a ventilation shaft.
He cycled the lock and collapsed onto the floor, gasping for air.
The room was small, lit only by the pale green light of a hydroponic algae tank. In the corner, on a bed made of foam packing peanuts and old blankets, lay a girl.
Rin.
She looked frail, her skin translucent. Wires ran from her temple to a bulky, humming dialysis machine Kai had stolen three years ago. Her breath hitched, a wet, rattling sound.
Hardware Rejection Syndrome. Her body was allergic to the cheap neural port the orphanage had installed in her when they were kids. It was slowly frying her nervous system.
Kai crawled over to her, his hands shaking as he pulled the military-grade drive from his pocket. It was still warm.
"I got it, Rin," he whispered, brushing a strand of hair from her sweaty forehead. "I got the ticket."
Rin's eyes fluttered open. They were milky, unfocused. The System interface in her brain was glitching, overlaying error messages on her vision.
"Kai..." she wheezed. "The sky... it's raining... numbers..."
"It's okay," Kai said, clutching her hand. "Rest. I'll fix it. I promise."
He stood up, pacing the small room. He needed to wipe the drive before he could sell it. It was encrypted. If he tried to fence it at the market as is, the Azure Bio-Systems trackers would be on him in ten minutes.
He sat down at his workbench, a chaotic mess of wires and soldering irons. He plugged the drive into his isolated terminal—an ancient, non-networked computer he'd restored.
Accessing...
Encryption: Level 5 (Corporate Secret).
Bypassing...
Kai's fingers flew across the mechanical keyboard. He wasn't a cultivator, but he knew code. He knew the language of the Gods better than they did.
The screen flickered. The drive unlocked.
But it wasn't a bank account key. It wasn't a weapon schematic.
It was a single file. An ancient, corrupted file type that Kai had never seen before.
Filename: ENTROPY_SUTRA.exe
Size: Infinite.
"What is this?" Kai muttered.
Suddenly, the text on the screen turned red. The pixels began to bleed, melting down the monitor like digital blood.
[ SYSTEM ALERT: ANOMALY DETECTED ]
[ COMPATIBLE HOST FOUND: SUBJECT ZERO (NULL) ]
[ INITIATING DIRECT NERVOUS SYSTEM OVERWRITE... ]
Kai jerked his hand back, but a spark of black electricity leaped from the terminal, arcing straight into his chest.
It didn't go for a port. It went for his heart.
Kai screamed, a sound that was swallowed by the hum of the ventilation shaft. His vision turned white, then black, then filled with a cascading waterfall of golden text that shattered into chaos.
He felt something inside him break. And then, something else... woke up.