“Tap, tap.”
It wasn’t the sound of soles striking concrete. It was a faint electromagnetic knocking that traveled directly through bone conduction in Taichi’s temporal bone and detonated deep inside his cerebral cortex.
The air temperature in the abandoned second-floor room seemed to plunge to freezing within seconds. A nauseating stench of scorched ozone rose through the air—the sickly-sweet smell unique to high-voltage current forcibly ionizing dust.
Taichi knelt on both knees atop a floor littered with glass shards and puddled water. The blood-red warning box on his retinal HUD flashed frantically at a high frequency of three times per second.
Plaintext [Warning: Neural system high-entropy overload 92%] [High-entropy residual data incursion progress: Core cerebral cortex] [Time remaining until complete brainstem burnout: 00:02:45] [Time remaining until complete infection: 00:02:44]
The phantom “feet,” woven from red error codes and fractured neural signals, now hovered in the air less than three meters from Taichi.
It had no flesh, no bones—only a mass of neon interference (Glitch) that twitched, tore apart, and reassembled itself endlessly in the void. Countless hair-thin strands of red, fiber-optic-like code extended downward from the severed ends of those feet, like greedy metal tentacles swaying experimentally in midair as they searched for a neural interface to parasitize.
“Guh… no… don’t come any closer…”
Absolute terror clamped around Taichi’s heart like a pair of freezing iron pincers.
Every muscle in his body spasmed violently from the tension. Instinctively, he wanted to close his eyes, just as he had countless times in the past whenever danger came—bury his head deep between his knees, curl into a trembling ball, and pretend this was nothing more than a hallucination brought on by a high fever.
His eyelids felt as heavy as iron. Blood vessels seeped red at the corners of his eyes from the agony, and they were unconsciously about to slam shut—
“You moron! Open your damn eyes! Don’t you dare close them, even if you die!”
From the depths of his mind, ECHO’s roar, laced with harsh metallic static, exploded like a thunderclap and forcibly jolted Taichi’s crumbling mind awake!
“ECHO… it… it’s coming…” Taichi wailed inside his head, his voice shaking beyond recognition. “If I close my eyes and don’t look at it… then maybe it’ll…”
“Close your eyes and you’ll turn into a dead pig with your brain boiled solid!”
ECHO unleashed a furious stream of abuse, its voice thick with utter disgust and rage. Taichi’s eardrums buzzed along with it.
“Listen up, you brainless data-worker burnout! This thing isn’t a flesh-and-blood monster. It’s high-entropy neural residue! It’s constructing itself directly inside your optic nerves through the optical rendering interface of that busted BCI of yours!
“The moment you close your eyes, your BCI system will automatically switch to fully enclosed inner-vision rendering! At that point, all the error codes will lose their external visual reference calibration and run wild directly inside your neural center! It’ll burn through your brainstem in one second!
“Open your damn eyes! Stare it down! Use the physical light from your external vision to forcibly dilute its rendering density!”
Taichi jolted violently at those words.
His desperate survival instinct overcame his fear. He forced his eyes wide open! The excessive stretch split tiny wounds at the corners, and blood mixed with droplets of acid rain as it slid down his cheeks, stinging his eyeballs with every inch.
Then a miracle happened.
When Taichi forced his eyes open and brought the physical light from the shabby second-floor window frame, the sickly glow of the yellowed holographic billboard outside, and the glass shards scattered across the floor back into his field of vision, the wildly flashing blood-red interference before him actually began to lag and warp ever so slightly!
The once-clear, lifelike red-code “feet” blurred and dispersed under the interference of real physical light, like graffiti splashed with water.
Plaintext [System prompt: External physical visual signal input successful] [Error-code rendering density decreased: 14%] [Brainstem overload rate slowed] [Countdown updated: 00:02:12]
“It works… it really works…” Taichi panted rapidly, every breath carrying a heavy metallic tang of blood.
“Don’t celebrate too soon, burnout!” ECHO doused him with a cold bucket of water inside his mind. “Physical light can only buy you two minutes! Its signal frequency is already locked tight onto your BCI’s backup memory slot! It’s like a live high-voltage cable laid across your skull. When those two minutes are up, your neural burn rate will still hit one hundred percent!”
Taichi clenched his teeth, his eyes bloodshot from refusing to blink as tears streamed down his face.
While keeping his eyes wide open and locked on the red-code feet slowly shifting through the air ahead of him, he pressed his ear to the floor and listened to the movement downstairs.
The silence below was even more lethal than the ghost story in front of him.
Through the cracks in the broken floor, Taichi could clearly see the two Stability Hounds at the bakery entrance.
Their matte-black, four-legged metal bodies radiated a merciless killing intent in the rainy night. The row of thermal-imaging array eyes in their mechanical heads swept back and forth at thirty hertz. The gray-suited AETHER eradicator held a high-pressure vaporizer and slowly circled Old Chen’s corpse, preparing to vaporize the last of the data.
“Don’t scream… don’t breathe too loudly… don’t run…” Taichi warned himself again and again inside his head.
If he made even one slightly excessive physical sound—or screamed involuntarily from fear—the Stability Hounds below would pour a storm of heavy electromagnetic machine-gun fire into the ruined floor within 0.05 seconds, turning him and the mass of red interference into ground meat.
A dead end ahead. A vengeful ghost behind.
“ECHO…” Taichi asked weakly inside his mind, his voice breaking with tears. “You… you’re a top-tier hacker, right? Hurry up and delete this code! Wipe it out of my BCI!”
“Delete it? Ha!” ECHO let out a cold, deeply sarcastic laugh. “You think it’s some trash image you can clear by right-clicking and sending to the recycle bin?
“Listen, kid. I’m just a data remnant suppressed in the backup slot right now. I don’t even have a physical processing unit! This Glitch is an environmental parasite drawn here by the high-entropy signal that erupted before Old Chen died! It doesn’t have a logic directory. It’s just a mass of rampaging pure electromagnetic waste!
“If you want to live, there’s only one way—find a grounding wire and shunt it out of your head!”
“Shunt it…?”
Taichi’s mind began racing through the extreme terror and pain.
As a data cleaner who had crawled around the very bottom of the city for years, he might not understand the software algorithms of high-level hackers, but when it came to the physical properties of hardware, circuits, and trash data, nobody knew them better than he did!
Neural waste and the Glitch curse were, at their core, highly concentrated high-entropy neural current that couldn’t be compressed by conventional algorithms.
They parasitized the human nervous system like static clinging to a dry sweater. Without a conductive interface, they would keep accumulating inside the human body until they burned the nerve cells clean; but if there were a stronger physical conductor, a lower-resistance path…
“Low resistance… grounding wire…” Taichi’s pupils contracted violently.
He abruptly shifted his eyes without moving his head, frantically scanning the abandoned room on the second floor using only his peripheral vision.
This room had originally been the port’s intermediate junction room for transferring old hardware.
Among the pile of scrap metal in the corner, reeking of mildew and machine oil, lay an old industrial distribution box that had clearly been half dismantled! Several wrist-thick high-voltage grounding cables, their outer sheaths long since split and shredded, sprawled limply across the acid-rain-soaked concrete floor like dead black snakes!
The other ends of those copper cables passed straight through the floor and were buried deep within the underground seawater lightning grid at the deepest point of Abandoned Port 13!
It was the physical grounding electrode with the lowest resistance and greatest capacity in all of District 13!
“There… the distribution box! The grounding cables!” Taichi urgently called out to ECHO inside his head.
“Guess you’re not quite as stupid as you look, burnout!” A rare gravity entered ECHO’s voice, along with a gambler’s excitement. “But copper cable alone is useless! The Glitch code has locked onto your neural interface. Why the hell would it abandon your brain to cling to some crappy copper cable? You have to give it bait!”
“What bait?!”
“Your BCI full-power overclock broadcast!” ECHO began laughing wildly, madness filling its voice. “Turn your brain-computer interface output power all the way up! Make your nervous system look like a perfect host that’s collapsing and releasing a massive amount of energy! Lure it in!
“Then, in the final ten-thousandth of a second before it devours you, shove that grounding cable into the BCI physical conductor port behind your cervical spine! Force it into the ground!”
Taichi was horrified. “You… you’re insane?! A full-power overclock broadcast? My BCI temperature is already 41.2 degrees! If I overclock it any further, my brain will explode! And… and if I stick a high-voltage copper cable into the port in my spine? If there’s any residual current in the wire, I’ll be electrocuted into charcoal!”
“Do nothing and you’ve got eighty seconds before you turn into brain-pulp tofu!” ECHO roared. “Take the gamble, or die right now! Your choice!”
The countdown timer in the lower-right corner of the HUD rang like a death knell:
Plaintext [Countdown: 00:01:15] [Brainstem neural burn rate: 88%] [Distance to high-entropy code: 1.2 meters]
The red-code “feet” hovering in midair suddenly convulsed violently.
The next second, countless red fiber-optic afterimages expanded explosively across Taichi’s vision, spreading like a gigantic blood-colored spiderweb as they descended over his face!
The stench of scorching in the room grew overwhelmingly intense. Taichi could even feel his eyebrows and hair standing wildly on end from the powerful static!
“There’s no time!” Taichi gave a despairing howl inside his head.
Either way, he was dead!
Deep within the soul that had long been accustomed to weakness, avoidance, and playing dead, the image of Old Chen’s brutal death and the despair of imminent death ignited something completely.
“ECHO! Overclock me!” Taichi screamed inside his head.
“That’s my boy! Show some backbone! Burn it up for me!”
Boom!
Taichi felt as if a burning gasoline bomb had been stuffed into the back of his neck!
The metal BCI patch behind his ear instantly grew hot as molten iron. The searing pain made his eyes bulge, and two streaks of blood gushed directly from his nostrils.
Plaintext [Warning: BCI core overclock initiated!] [Output power: 200%… 350%…] [Neural current signal strength surging!]
At that moment, Taichi’s brain emitted dazzling neural-wave signals. In cybernetic vision, his entire body seemed to transform into a high-energy lighthouse that had suddenly blazed to life in the dark, rainy night!
“Raaaaagh!”
The mass of red Glitch interference descending over Taichi let out an electromagnetic shriek beyond the description of human language!
The powerful neural-wave bait instantly seized all of its attention! The red-code tentacles that had originally been spread out snapped together, transforming into an insanely violent blood-red electromagnetic spear that shot toward the BCI port behind Taichi’s cervical spine!
Distance: 0.3 meters!
0.1 meters!
“Now! Grab it!” Taichi screamed inwardly, nearly losing his mind.
He pitched forward, enduring the tearing agony of every overloaded muscle, and reached his trembling right hand toward the grounding cable in the scrap heap—the one with its sheath split open and thick, raw copper wires exposed!
His fingertips touched the cold, bone-biting metal.
Without the slightest hesitation, Taichi used every last ounce of strength in his body to jam the rough bare-copper end against the metal BCI physical conductor port behind his neck, which was spewing billows of white smoke!
“Go back to your hole in the ground!” Taichi unleashed the most violent roar of his life.
One ten-thousandth of a second later—
The blood-red code spear pierced Taichi’s BCI interface with pinpoint accuracy!
Yet before the enormous high-entropy data could begin burning through Taichi’s nerve cells, the bare copper end clamped against the port immediately provided the rampaging neural current with a physical discharge channel whose resistance approached zero!
Sizzle—! Boom!
A blinding blue-violet electrical arc suddenly exploded through the second-floor ruins!
The colossal current of neural waste and Glitch code surged along the bare copper conductor, transforming into a rampaging electromagnetic dragon that thundered into the underground seawater lightning grid!
The violent current backlash instantly numbed Taichi’s entire right arm, erasing all sensation. The immense impact slammed his whole body hard against the brick wall, and he spat blood.
The air in the second-floor room suddenly relaxed.
The heavy scorching stench and despairing pressure receded rapidly like a retreating tide.
Taichi collapsed onto the floor and sucked in great gulps of air, his chest heaving violently. His vision gradually returned from horrific red to its normal colors. The red warning in the lower-right corner of his HUD jumped frantically several times before finally fading out, replaced by a line of faint green text:
Plaintext [High-entropy residual data forcibly discharged through grounding] [BCI core temperature decreasing: 39.5°C] [Glitch curse status: Temporarily dormant/suppressed] [Warning: Countdown locked at: 00:00:01]
“Ha… ha… I… I’m not dead…” Taichi stared at the timer frozen at “00:00:01” in his field of vision. The overwhelming joy of surviving nearly brought him to tears.
“Hmph. A burnout who didn’t die.” ECHO’s voice sounded inside his mind. It was still as vicious as ever, but there was slightly less contempt than before and something more complicated in its tone. “Your reaction time wasn’t bad. If your hand had been 0.01 seconds slower, your brain would be leaking out of your ears right now.”
Taichi lay sprawled on the floor, without enough strength left to lift even one finger.
Yet before he could catch his breath—
A terrifying series of heavy metallic footsteps suddenly came from downstairs.
“Warning. Abnormally high-voltage electromagnetic pulse discharge detected in the second-floor area.”
The eradicator’s cold, emotionless mechanical voice carried clearly through the mask and into the rainy-night alley:
“Hound One, Hound Two, switch to thermal imaging and electromagnetic tracking mode. Enter the second floor. Execute termination and formatting.”
Bwooo—!
The calm red scanning eyes in the heads of the two Stability Hounds suddenly erupted with glaring blood-red light! Eight heavy metal legs smashed through the concrete as they climbed the pipes along the exterior wall of the abandoned building toward Taichi’s position on the second floor at an astonishing speed!
Taichi’s pupils contracted. His blood froze all over again.
He had just exhausted all his strength and BCI power. Now he couldn’t even stand up and run!
“Shit! That electrical discharge brought the megacorp’s dogs down on us!” ECHO cursed under its breath. “Kid, if you can’t stand, crawl! If those dogs catch you, you won’t even get the chance to become waste!”
“I… I can’t move…” Taichi’s teeth chattered as he watched helplessly while one pitch-black mechanical leg punched through the brick wall of the second-floor windowsill. The monstrous metal head, trailing high-heat exhaust pipes, poked through the breach!
The gaping muzzle of a 20-millimeter heavy electromagnetic machine gun pointed straight at Taichi’s chest.
The eradication operation was about to begin.
At that moment, in this hopeless deadlock of mortal danger—
Rumble!
A roar like a beast’s bellow suddenly came from the mouth of the alley: the thunderous growl of an old diesel engine!
An old black-market tow truck modified to look like a mobile metal canister smashed through the megacorp’s laser security line at insane speed. Its tires tore through the puddles before it swung hard into a sideways skid and blocked the bakery entrance!
The tow truck’s cab window was yanked open. A bare-chested man with a crude steel mechanical skeleton fitted to his right arm leaned out. His left hand gripped the steering wheel while his right hand aimed a welding torch spitting painful sparks at the second-floor window as he roared:
“Taichi! If you’re still fucking alive, jump the hell down! I’m here to pick you up!”
It was Bolt!
Taichi’s entire body jerked.
Bolt slammed a red physical button beside the driver’s seat. A heavy homemade EMP device built from an old microwave and a car battery in the back of the tow truck erupted with a thunderous boom!
The powerful undirected electromagnetic pulse spread like an invisible wave, instantly covering the entire alley!
The two Stability Hounds climbing onto the second-floor windowsill had their red scanning eyes flicker twice. Then black smoke billowed from their heads, and their massive metal bodies lost balance and crashed hard from the second-floor wall onto the concrete below!
Even the high-pressure vaporizer in the gray-suited eradicator’s hand blared an alarm under the EMP’s impact and forcibly entered cooling lockout mode.
“Taichi! What the hell are you waiting for?! Jump!” Bolt screamed his lungs out from below.
In the second-floor room, Taichi didn’t know where the strength came from.
He clenched his teeth, endured the numbness in his right hand and the agony ripping through his entire nervous system, and hauled himself onto the windowsill. Then he leaped toward the tow truck’s rear bed, piled high with old tires—
Riiip!
The neon lights of the rainy night streaked rapidly backward before his eyes.
Taichi slammed into the pile of old tires, their springy cushioning nearly knocking the breath out of him.
“Hold on! I’m hitting the gas!”
Bolt roared as his mechanical right arm yanked down the gearshift. The old diesel engine unleashed a furious growl, and the black tow truck belched thick black smoke as it tore through the night of acid rain and neon, speeding toward the black-market alleys deep in District 13!
The second-floor ruins receded into the distance. The megacorp eradicator’s cold mask gradually shrank in the rearview mirror.
Taichi lay on his back amid the old tires in the truck bed, icy acid rain striking his face with a real, stinging sensation.
Inside his mind, ECHO gave a cold snort:
“Welcome to the real world, burnout. Your escape has only just begun.”
Taichi closed his eyes, then abruptly opened them again. He watched the neon interference rolling across the night sky and forced a smile that looked worse than crying.
He had survived.
Amid the blood and rain of the first night, this cowardly data cleaner had, for the first time, wrested his life back from the hands of the Grim Reaper.