The mana shard pulsed in Leon's palm like a captured heartbeat, its amethyst surface cool yet humming with contained violence. Outside his shattered capsule, Neo-Kyoto was screaming itself to death. The rhythmic thump of corporate security gunships now vied with stranger sounds—crystalline shrieks, the wet tearing of transmuted concrete, and once, a low, resonant chant that made the fillings in his teeth ache.
He couldn't stay here. The drone-cadaver's destruction was a beacon. His Diagnostic Sight, still active, painted the hallway in layers of alarming data. [Structural Integrity: 38% and declining] glowed over buckling walls. [Mana Flux: Volatile] shimmered as eddies of raw energy, visible as shimmering heat-haze, bled from cracks in reality itself. One pool of energy, a sickly yellow, dissolved a section of the floor into bubbling, sweet-smelling resin.
"Think, Leon. Just like debugging," he muttered, the old mantra from his Code-Mender days. But this wasn't corrupted data. This was corrupted physics.
The system interface remained, a ghostly blue pane in his peripheral vision. He focused on the Log Access.
---
[System Log - Local Events]
· 00:01: System Initialization. Celestial Dao/Ark Protocol Collision.
· 00:03: First Wave Integration. Reality Stability drops to 65%. Spawn of Tier-F Anomalies/Aberrations.
· 00:07: Localized Entropic Cascade detected in Sector 7-G (Your location).
· 00:12: Host Leon Ryker eliminates [Aberration: Drone-Cadaver Amalgam]. Stability recovers +0.1%.
· 00:15: Energy Signatures detected approaching. Classification: [Survivors], [Anomaly], [???].
---
The last line chilled him. Survivors he could understand. The [???] was a problem. His system, for all its grand claims, had gaps.
He needed a weapon. The pipe was bent. His eyes swept the room, Diagnostic Sight highlighting objects with new tags. His broken data-slate: [Junk: Silica & Rare Metals. Mana-Conductive Potential: Low]. A ceramic kitchen knife: [Material: Basic. Hardness: 5. No Energy Affinity]. The remains of the drone: [Debris: Tech-Waste. Contains trace [Entropic] residue. CAUTION].
Then he saw it. In the corner, forgotten under a heap of synthetic fabric, was his old work kit—a duralloy case containing tactile interfaces, fiber-optic strands, and a palm-sized Quantum-Firmware Splicer. A tool for hardwiring neural patches into crippled servers. Its system readout glowed a soft, promising blue.
[Artifact: Industrial Splicer. Integrity: 82%. Capabilities: Precision Energy Channeling, Micro-Material Bonding. Compatibility with Host's [System Core] detected. Upgrade Potential: High.]
He grabbed it. The moment his fingers closed around the insulated grip, new text scrolled.
**[Would you like to bind [Quantum-Firmware Splicer] as your [Primordial Implement]? This action is irreversible and will align the tool's base functions with your System Authority.]**
Primordial Implement? The term sounded like something from the fantasy net-novels he'd skimmed during lunch breaks. But the tool in his hand was cold, solid reality. It was a piece of the world he understood—circuitry and logic. In this new, insane reality, that familiarity was a lifeline.
"Bind it," he whispered.
A circuit-board pattern of golden light erupted from his palm, snaking over the splicer's dull grey casing. The tool grew warm, then hot. Components inside rearranged themselves with audible clicks and crystalline chimes. When the light faded, the splicer was transformed. It was sleeker, its surface now a matte black etched with faint, luminous lines that pulsed in time with his own heartbeat. The simple data-probe tip had reshaped into a sharp, three-pronged configuration, crackling with barely-visible energy.
**[Binding Complete. Quantum-Firmware Splicer has been upgraded to [Sunder-Splicer].]**
**Class:** Primordial Implement (Seed-State).
**Qualities:** [Mana-Conductive], [Reality-Anchor (Minor)], [Adaptive Function].
**Abilities Unlocked:** [Precision Cut], [Energy Syphon], [Basic Diagnostics].
It felt right in his hand—an extension of his will, like the finest code-editor he'd ever used. He aimed it at the bubbling yellow resin on the floor and focused on Basic Diagnostics.
**[Anomaly: Amber Dissolution Field. Converts simple polymers and base metals into viscous saccharine compounds. Energy Signature: Bio-Alchemical. Neutralization Suggestion: Disrupt molecular attraction with reverse-phase mana pulse.]**
He didn't know what a "reverse-phase mana pulse" was, but the Sunder-Splicer hummed, as if anticipating his intent. He willed it to act. The pronged tip glowed blue-white, and a thin, precise beam lanced out, not at the resin, but at the shimmering energy field above it. With a sound like a ringing glass, the field shattered. The resin stopped bubbling and hardened into inert, sticky sludge.
A sliver of warmth flowed back through the tool into him.
**[Ambient Anomalous Energy harvested. +0.05 Units Mana.]**
Progress. Now, to move.
He stepped into the hallway, the Sunder-Splicer held low. The corridor was a charnel house of the new age. Two capsules had fused together into a fleshy, breathing membrane. A maintenance bot had sprouted insectile legs and was skittering across the ceiling, trailing sparks. Leon kept his Diagnostic Sight wide, filtering the visual noise for threats and resources. He avoided the pulsing anomalies, siphoned minor energy fields with his tool, and moved with a cautious speed he never knew he possessed.
The stairwell exit was blocked by a cascade of that glowing Verdant Dissolution Mold, turning the fire door into a crumbling sponge of earth and roots. [Stability Drain: Low. Bypass suggested.] His eyes went to the emergency access panel—an old, hardwired relay for maintenance drones. A plan formed, half Code-Mender logic, half new intuition.
He pried the panel open with his tool. Inside were crude copper wires and optical threads. Not data, but pure electrical pathways. He focused, not on the physical wires, but on the potential within them. The system whispered to him, showing him glowing pathways. He touched the Sunder-Splicer to two points.
**[Command: Redirect building's residual backup power through conduit. Create sustained electrical field across mold growth.]**
He wasn't sure if it would work. But the tool flared, and electricity arced from the wires, not in a wild spark, but in a contained, crackling curtain that sheared across the organic growth. The mold blackened and recoiled, withering to dust. The system hummed. [Localized Stability +0.2%. Ingenuity Bonus detected.]
He kicked through the brittle remains and emerged onto a mid-level access gantry overlooking the main artery of Sector 7-G.
The scene below stole his breath.
Neo-Kyoto's familiar canyon of steel and neon was gone, transformed into a layered hellscape. The street itself was fractured, with sections of asphalt floating on chunks of earth, held aloft by shimmering energy. The giant holographic billboard for "Zhukov Dynamics" now displayed a looping, cryptic mandala that pulsed with headache-inducing light. People ran, but they were no longer just citizens.
Leon saw a man in a business suit, his skin crackling with white energy, leaping twenty feet to smash a scuttling anomaly with his bare fists. A Tag appeared: [Survivor. Energy Profile: Awakened (Mana-Forged Physique). Threat Level: Low-Medium].
Across the street, a trio of figures moved with chilling coordination. They wore the tattered remnants of corporate security uniforms, but their movements were too fluid, their eyes glowing with a uniform cyan light. They cornered a fleeing woman. One raised a hand, and the air coalesced into a blade of frozen light. [Anomaly: Cognitohazard Survivors. Classification: F-9. Profile: Psychically Linked, System-Acclimated. Threat: High. Likely possess [Fragmentary User Interface].]
Before the blade could fall, a new force intervened.
From a side alley, a figure strode out. He was tall, dressed in simple grey synthetic cloth, but he moved with an impossible, weightless grace. His face was calm, ageless. In his hand was not a tool or gun, but a short, wooden flute. He raised it to his lips.
No audible sound came out. But the air rippled.
A visible wave of emerald-green energy, complex and structured like a musical score, washed over the three linked survivors. They screamed, clutching their heads. The light-blade shattered. Their psychic link, visible to Leon's Diagnostic Sight as pulsing cyan threads, snapped like over-tuned strings. The man in grey moved, a blur. Three gentle taps of his flute on their foreheads. They collapsed, unconscious, the invasive energy purged from them.
The Tag that flashed over this new figure was unlike any other.
[Entity: Legacy Cultivator. Designation: Unknown. Energy Profile: [Pure Qi] - Foundation Establishment Stage (Approx.). System Interaction: [Resistant]. Warning: This entity operates on pre-Integration paradigms. Hostile to systemic disruption. Threat Level: **Extreme**.]
Legacy Cultivator. The system's earlier warning made terrible sense. They were from the "Celestial Dao" side of the crash—beings who had cultivated their power long before the System tried to quantify it. And this one saw the chaos not as an apocalypse, but as… an opportunity? A violation?
The cultivator's head turned. Not toward Leon, but toward the floating, mandala-displaying billboard. His eyes narrowed in distaste.
"This artificial Dao… this noise," the cultivator spoke, his voice carrying perfectly over the din without raising in volume. "It offends the natural order."
He pointed his flute. A concentrated beam of vibrant green Qi, dense as a laser, lanced out. It struck the billboard's projector array. But instead of exploding, the technology dissolved, unraveling into its component base elements—metal flakes, silica dust, and motes of light that were swiftly absorbed by the swirling energy in the air. The mandala winked out.
The act sent a violent shudder through the local reality. Leon's interface blared a warning.
**[Alert! Local Reality Stability has dropped by 5%! Legacy Cultivator action has exacerbated system conflict. Entropic pressure building.]**
The very air seemed to grow heavier. Cracks of void-black energy, like jagged lightning, spiderwebbed through the space the billboard had occupied. From those cracks, something began to pull. Debris, loose energy, even the unconscious bodies of the linked survivors, began sliding toward the growing rupture.
The cultivator frowned, sensing the destabilization but misinterpreting its source. "The corruption resists purification," he murmured, gathering more Qi for another, likely more devastating, strike.
Leon acted without thinking. He was a System Administrator. However provisional, his objective was stability. This cultivator, for all his power, was making things worse. He raised the Sunder-Splicer, not at the cultivator, but at the nexus of the growing entropic crack. He didn't know a command. He simply poured his intent into the tool, using it as a focus for his fledgling authority.
STOP. SEAL. REJECT THE VOID.
A thin, gold-and-silver wire of energy, comprised of stark system code and his own raw will, shot from the pronged tip. It wasn't powerful. Compared to the cultivator's dense Qi, it was a thread against a rope. But it was precise. It stitched into the edges of the crack, not with brute force, but with a corrective command, a patch for reality itself.
**[Administrator Command Issued: Localized Reality Anchor. Cost: 0.5 Units of accumulated Mana.]**
The sliding debris stopped. The crack's growth halted, its edges fusing into jagged, but stable, scars in the air. The violent pull ceased.
The effect was instantaneous. The Legacy Cultivator whirled, his serene composure broken by a flash of shock and then intense scrutiny. His eyes, which now glowed with internal jade light, locked onto Leon on the gantry.
"You," the cultivator said, his voice cutting through the distance. "You interfere with the Flowing Dao. You wield the scent of the new prison… yet you mend its bars?" His gaze drilled into the Sunder-Splicer in Leon's hand. "A curious implement. Not a spiritual treasure, yet not wholly mortal."
Leon froze, the weight of that attention like a physical pressure. His system frantically analyzed.
**[Entity is scanning you. [System Core] signature detected. Countermeasures: None. Prediction: 87% probability of hostile engagement.]**
"Your methods are an aberration," the cultivator declared, taking a single, ground-covering step forward. The air around him chilled. "You treat the world as a broken mechanism. It is a living body. One does not 'patch' a poisoned meridian. One purges the poison."
He raised his flute. This time, it was aimed at Leon.
Leon's mind raced. He couldn't fight this. His authority was about mending, not combat. He looked past the cultivator, at the street, at the survivors, at the still-fragile anchor he'd just created. He had one card to play.
He forced his voice to steadiness, using the same tone he'd used to explain critical system failures to oblivious corporate overseers. "You're right. It is poisoned. But your purge is killing the patient." He gestured with the splicer at the entropic scar. "You see corruption. I see a fault line. You sealing it your way just makes a bigger fault. I'm… containing the damage. So we can find the real source."
The cultivator paused. The killing intent wavered, replaced by cold calculation. He was a being of intuition and millennia of tradition, confronted by something utterly alien—a logic that was technical, systemic, and yet undeniably effective in this specific, twisted context.
"A custodian of the broken world," the cultivator mused, lowering his flute a fraction. "A novel, and pathetic, destiny."
Before he could decide Leon's fate, a new sound erupted from above—the heavy, rhythmic thump of tandem rotors. A Zhukov Dynamics gunship, modified with glowing mana-conductive plating and what looked like crystalline weapon pods, descended like a steel vulture. A amplified voice boomed down.
"ATTENTION UNREGULATED ENERGY SIGNATURES. YOU ARE IN VIOLATION OF CORPORATE DIRECTIVE ALPHA-ZERO. SUBMIT FOR SCANNING AND CONTAINMENT. RESISTANCE WILL BE MET WITH SYSTEM-COMPLIANT FORCE."
A spotlight, emitting a pale blue field that made Leon's skin crawl, pinned both him and the cultivator.
The cultivator's face twisted in utter contempt. "Vermin in flying metal boxes. They believe their toys grant them authority."
Leon saw his chance—a slim, dangerous one. Two apex predators now eyed each other, with him caught in the middle. He took a step back, toward the unstable gantry railing, his grip tightening on the Sunder-Splicer. The system's primary objective still glowed in his mind: Stabilize Local Reality Matrix.
But to do that, he first had to survive the next five minutes. And that meant navigating between a force of ancient nature and the newly-armed fist of corporate control, both of which saw him as either a bug or a resource to be harvested.
The gunship's weapon pods began to rotate, humming with gathered power. The cultivator's Qi flared, a cyclone of emerald light rising around him.
Leon Ryker, the Code-Mender, the provisional Administrator, dropped off the gantry into the chaotic shadows below, the chase beginning anew.