The pale blue cold light from the holographic projection flowed silently through the dim, damp lead-lined darkroom, illuminating the battered underground chamber as a phantom, frozen, sacred white temple.
The high-end laboratory projected in midair was refined, spacious, and luxurious to the point of cruelty.
It was the [AETHER Technologies · Core Security R&D Hub], perched at the very top of the first tier, “the Zenith District (The Glass Apex),” a place no ordinary low-level citizen could set foot in even after exhausting an entire lifetime.
All around it were immaculate white polymer-alloy acoustic panels riddled with microperforations. Beyond the enormous curved floor-to-ceiling bulletproof crystal windows stretched the Zenith District’s eternally clear blue sky, where not even a single drop of acid rain ever fell. Countless quantum supercomputer arrays hovered above the clouds, glowing with a soft silver-white radiance. Against the lower city below, shrouded year-round in black water, rust, and toxic fog, they formed a stark contrast between heaven and hell.
At the very center of the holographic laboratory, Old Chen stood before a gigantic cylindrical cryogenic stasis pod three meters tall, dressed in a crisp, immaculate white chief researcher’s uniform.
His back was slightly stooped, and bottomless sorrow, self-reproach, and despair flowed through his eyes.
Old Chen slowly raised his withered fingers, mottled with age spots, and gently pressed them against the pod’s thick cryogenic blastproof crystal glass. Inside, immersed in pale blue neural-activation nutrient fluid, floated a young male test subject. Hundreds of neural fiber-optic lines pierced his entire body, while his face was twisted and deformed by extreme agony. It was the same [Test Subject: Corpse-0942] whose designation had just appeared in the flash drive.
“Taichi, when you unlock this frequency lock and see this holographic recording…”
In the recording, Old Chen slowly turned around and spoke toward the recorder’s lens. His voice was hoarse and heavy, threaded with faint electrical static, as if he carried the blood and tears of hundreds of thousands of dead souls across the entire city:
“You grew up scavenging for food in the trash heaps of Abandoned Port 13. Every day, you watched blue-green industrial wastewater rush down from the enormous sewage conduits in the Zenith District. You watched obsolete neural servers and burned-out motherboards dumped down as garbage from the megacorps’ cargo airships… For the past twenty years, you—and every scavenger and cleaner in all of District 13—thought they were nothing more than unavoidable industrial byproducts produced when the megacorps manufactured high-end android cybernetics and military chips. Right?”
Old Chen let out a self-mocking, miserable laugh. Dry and grating, it echoed through the dead-silent darkroom, making Taichi and Bolt’s hearts clench again and again:
“But now I’m going to tell you… that wastewater and residue you saw were never industrial waste.”
“They were the spiritual waste left after human lives were brutally wrung dry and distilled by algorithms!”
Old Chen drew a deep breath, his entire body beginning to tremble violently. Scarlet blood vessels filled the depths of his eyes:
“Three years ago, AETHER Technologies’ highest board of directors secretly joined with the Zenith District’s two other major oligarchs to pass a final act called [Elysium-0 (Pure Elysium State)]. The elite tycoons, megacorp directors, and hereditary politicians who ruled the entire city from the Zenith District had bodies that had decayed to the limit of old age. Modern biomedicine could no longer stop their telomeres from collapsing. They longed to upload their brain-based neural consciousness intact into the eternally running quantum supercomputer cloud, escaping the birth, aging, sickness, and death of their physical shells and gaining true immortality.”
“But the human brain is too complex, too primitive, too chaotic!”
Old Chen suddenly raised his voice, his words turning sharp and rasping with intense agitation:
“Love, hatred, greed, fear, despair, obsession, guilt… When these chaotic emotional codes continue running inside massive quantum servers in the cloud, they trigger an unpredictable ‘Neural Entropy Cascade’! In mere microseconds, those untamed negative emotions cause the logic of the entire virtual neural core to collapse, driving their digital consciousness completely insane and reducing them to mindless, berserk attack dogs!”
“To let the rich masters’ souls live forever in pristine purity and eternal happiness in the cloud, we so-called ‘genius neural architects,’ kept in luxury captivity by the megacorps, were forced to develop a bloody architecture called ‘Reverse Emotion Distillation.’”
Old Chen turned around and pointed frantically at the agony-wracked test subject convulsing inside the stasis pod behind him, crying out his accusation with soul-rending force:
“Using high-frequency algorithms, we forcibly stripped and refined all the negative emotional codes—pain, regret, fear, sorrow, and violence—from the rich people’s consciousness models. But quantum code obeys the universe’s strictest law of mass-energy conservation—high-entropy data can’t simply be erased by an algorithm! It needs a physical vessel to bear the cost of heat dissipation, decay, and code annihilation!”
“How could those noble big shots in the Zenith District possibly allow their supercomputer rooms to be polluted by this filthy negative data?”
“So the megacorps came up with the cheapest, cruelest, most inhuman solution of all—”
Old Chen suddenly stepped forward, pressing his entire face almost against the holographic recorder’s lens. Two murky tears of remorse ran down his cheeks:
“They secretly injected this high-risk, highly toxic neural waste—negative neural residue potent enough to burn an ordinary person’s brain synapses to a crisp in an instant—through the underground fiber-optic network spanning the entire city, straight into the brain-computer interfaces of three hundred thousand low-level civilians in the lower city and District 13!”
“They used us as living heat sinks! They used poor people’s brains as sewers for filtering toxins!”
“Fuck…”
Bolt, standing beside the workbench, froze as if he’d been struck by ten thousand volts.
His thick flesh-and-blood hand clamped around the edge of the oak table. The alloy steel plate dented deeply beneath his fingers. Even his breathing stopped completely from the sheer shock and fury.
In the holographic recording, Old Chen continued to expose the final blood-soaked truth in a trembling voice:
“When the brains of the low-level civilians bearing the waste reached their physiological limits and they died violently in unbearable pain and injustice, the negative neural currents their bodies couldn’t digest collapsed and condensed inside the dead person’s brain memory… That’s Glitch! That’s the cybernetic vengeful spirit you’ve seen in the streets and alleys!”
“This isn’t some random Bug generated by the system, and it sure as hell isn’t a naturally mutated computer virus! This is a three-year-long, deliberate, organized act of ‘artificial data poisoning’!”
“Now, the underground disposal well at the deepest part of District 13, Sub-Sector 9, has accumulated the resentful neural waste of hundreds of thousands of neural test subjects. The data pressure there has reached the critical point where it’s about to trigger a citywide digital tsunami. To cover up this crime against humanity and act of extermination, AETHER has decided to activate full-area high-energy microwave vaporization within forty-eight hours, wiping the three hundred thousand living people and all the vengeful-spirit data off the map and reducing them to ash!”
“And the bloodthirsty warlords of Styx Heavy Industries want to take advantage of the situation before the purge, secretly capture these high-risk vengeful spirits, and smuggle and sell them as ultimate biochemical electromagnetic weapons!”
Old Chen pulled a translucent optical data chip from inside his lab coat and pressed it hard against the recorder’s lens:
“Taichi, this black box contains all the underlying protocol source code for [Elysium-0], along with the access authorization key for the only ‘No. 07 Slag-Discharge Main Conduit’ leading from District 13 to the Steel Middle Tier (Mid-Tier) that hasn’t been sealed off by the army!”
“Take it! Get out of this scrap-metal pit! Go to the edge of the Steel Middle Tier and find a place called the ‘Nameless Clinic’… I left one final set of tools for you there!”
“Remember, Taichi… don’t be afraid to die! Even a coward can be a hero! The future of this city… isn’t in the hands of those heartless algorithms in the Zenith District. It’s in the hands of those of us whose souls remain uncorrupted!”
Before he could finish, a thunderous boom erupted behind Old Chen in the holographic recording as a blast of high-energy ion beams tore through the blastproof alloy door!
“BOOM!”
Several AETHER execution troops in pure-white, fully enclosed powered armor burst through the door, high-pressure vaporizers in hand.
Old Chen took one last look back at the camera. A grim smile of calm acceptance crossed his face:
“Run… Taichi…”
“SSSSHHH—!”
A blinding white-hot beam instantly swallowed Old Chen’s figure. Under the violent impact of high-energy particles, the holographic image was ripped apart into countless pale blue points of light that drifted through the air, dissolving amid faint electrical crackles into the cold, dim darkroom.
“Click.”
The projection crystal lens of the flash drive went dark.
Only a deathly, suffocating silence remained in the darkroom.
Taichi stood blankly before the workbench, staring at the metal flash drive as it gradually cooled.
He had always thought Old Chen was nothing more than a cringing old bastard barely scraping by in the slums, haggling over two synthetic protein bars every single day. Only now did he understand what kind of despair and darkness the old man had carried during the final three years of his life—and how, beneath the megacorps’ fangs, he had fought to win one last chance at survival for the three hundred thousand wretched lives of District 13.
“Warning: Holographic decryption has triggered the black box’s ‘secondary emergency broadcast beacon.’”
ECHO’s icy voice exploded without warning deep inside Taichi’s mind. It carried an urgency and sense of lethal danger unlike anything before:
“The beacon has transmitted an ultra-low-frequency acoustic pulse penetrating the geological strata… Our physical coordinates have been exposed!”
“What?!” Taichi snapped back to reality.
“RUMBLE—!”
Almost in the same instant ECHO finished speaking, a skin-crawling violent tremor suddenly rolled through the fifteen-meter-thick scrap-iron protective layer and foundation overhead!
“Crack! Crack! Crack!”
The old tungsten bulbs on the darkroom ceiling all burst at once under the force of the powerful electromagnetic pulse, showering the floor with shards of glass!
Then several stark-white searchlight beams, bright enough to pierce the gaps between steel plates, came plunging down through the garage’s rooftop ventilation and skylight shafts. Like huge frozen swords of light, they stabbed viciously into the dim underground garage!
Outside, beneath the stormy night sky, the shrill roar of several heavy turbine engines tore through the air.
“Warning: Three ‘Styx Heavy Industries Yasha-class heavy armed airships’ detected in the airspace directly overhead.”
“Twelve military exoskeleton power-armored units detected on the ground, completing a tactical encirclement. Thermal-lock rate: 100%.”
Outside the garage, a cold, brutal ultimatum boomed from a high-powered loudspeaker, distorted by heavy-metal reverb as it echoed through the alley under the pounding rain:
‘Listen up, rats inside.’
‘You have thirty seconds to place the [STYX-EXP-0881] experimental prosthetic limb and the [Chen Shouren Black Box] intact outside the door.’
‘When time runs out, a full-power high-explosive thermobaric penetrator will completely bury this garage and its foundation within one second! Countdown begins: 30… 29… 28…’
The grinding treads of heavy exoskeletons crushing scrap metal and the crisp metallic clack of twenty-millimeter electromagnetic machine guns cycling their bolts rang out in dense succession beyond the roll-up door, like a death god tolling a funeral bell.
In the underground garage, the three of them were trapped in a hopeless dead end, surrounded on all sides.
“Surrender means death.” Standing atop a floor covered in broken glass, Bolt lowered his eyes to the homemade heavy shotgun in his hand. The muscles in his face slowly twisted into an utterly feral grin. “The bastards under Drake never leave survivors. They’ll just cut our heads off and take ’em back for their report.”
“Bolt! Can we still use that escape chute beneath the garage leading to the No. 07 sewage conduit?!” Taichi quickly pulled out the tape and flash drive and shoved them into the double-layer insulated pouch closest to his chest.
“Yeah! But the chute opens into the underground wastewater channel. Once we slide out through there, the hundreds of tons of scrap metal collapsing overhead will seal off our way back completely!” Bolt roared.
“Then seal it!” Taichi snatched up the electric ignition switch on the workbench, connected to four drums of high-purity chemical acetone cleaner and industrial ether. Without hesitation, he grabbed the radiation-proof helmet welded together from an old CRT tube and lead plates and clamped it onto his head!
At the lower right corner of his retinal HUD, the scarlet timer frozen at [00:00:01] glimmered with an eerie, bloodthirsty light beneath the powerful searchlights piercing the lead plates!
Taichi seized the electric ignition switch connected to the four drums of high-purity chemical acetone cleaner and industrial ether on the workbench, then turned toward Bolt and ECHO, who was frantically calculating escape routes inside his mind:
“Ten seconds left on the countdown! Bolt, get in the chute!”
“Fuck! You little punk! Now that’s got some balls!” Bolt roared, yanking open a heavy circular cast-iron manhole cover in the repair bay floor with one hand. He leaped headfirst into the pitch-black underground chute!
Outside the door, the loudspeaker’s final countdown crashed down like thunder: ‘…3… 2… 1! Fire!’
The concrete ceiling overhead split violently at the instant the penetrator struck!
Standing in the center of four drums of chemical explosives about to detonate, Taichi slowly curled his lips into the cold grin of a desperate madman from the bottom of society:
“Welcome to District 13… you fucking warlord princes!”
Taichi slammed his thumb down on the ignition button! Then, carried by the blast’s violent recoil, he threw himself into the bottomless underground chute!
“BOOOOOOM!”
A heaven-shaking fireball that lit up the stormy night sky over all of District 13 erupted inside the underground garage!