The day after the Awakening was the first day of a new, brutal world order at Shanghai No. 1 High.
The old hierarchy, a comfortable pyramid built on academic grades and family wealth, had been shattered overnight. In its place, a savage new food chain had emerged, forged in the fires of the Awakening ceremony. Power—raw, measurable, spiritual power—was the only currency that now mattered.
The classroom had transformed. It was no longer a place of learning; it was the royal court of a newly crowned prince. Wang Feng, smug and radiant in his A-Rank glory, held the center of it all. He was a sun, and a dozen fawning sycophants orbited him, laughing at his jokes and hanging on his every word as he loudly recounted the lucrative contract offers he was already fielding from major Hero Guilds.
Other students with lesser, but still respectable, C and D-Rank talents formed their own exclusive cliques. They were the new nobility, their conversations a flurry of technical jargon about spirit power control and meridian purification, deliberately designed to exclude the un-Awakened commoners.
And then there was Qin Mo.
He wasn't at the bottom of this new social ladder. He was in the abyss beneath it. He was a pariah. A black hole of failure that students would physically alter their paths to avoid, as if his "triple-zero" status were a contagious plague.
He was less than a failure. He was an irrelevance.
During the morning's history lecture, the teacher, Mr. Chen, was passionately recounting the heroic sacrifices of the First Abyssal War. His voice swelled with patriotic fervor. "It was humanity's ingenuity that won us the Battle of the Pearl River!" Mr. Chen declared, his fists clenched. "Our ancestors, with no prior knowledge, found the enemy's weaknesses and fought back!"
Qin Mo listened, his face a mask of placid boredom. 'Ingenuity?' a cold, analytical thought corrected in his mind. 'Wrong. The correct term is 'enemy incompetence'.''The historical records are a joke. The Abyssal Commander K'thrax was a fool. A minor atmospheric miscalculation cost him an entire planet. A lesson for amateurs that this world has mistaken for its own genius.'
While the class absorbed the heroic propaganda, Qin Mo was already continents away in his mind, idly designing a multi-layered, quantum-entangled encryption protocol based on principles from his Cybernetic God avatar. It was a pleasant mental exercise to pass the crushing boredom.
The school bell chimed. The classroom emptied in a rush of chatter. Qin Mo remained, a statue in the suddenly quiet room. After a few minutes, he rose. Not for the cafeteria. For the library.
It was an old, grand building, a sanctuary of silence mostly abandoned in an age of digital access. He found a public terminal in a secluded carrel, the screen dark and dusty. Any action he took here would be logged. It was child's play for any decent network security agent to trace. For him, it was also child's play to erase.
His fingers, once lazy, now danced across the keyboard, typing lines of code with a speed that would have shattered the perception of any who saw him. He wasn't hacking the school's firewall. Hacking was a crude act of breaking down a door. He simply saw the cracks that were already there, the forgotten maintenance backdoors left by lazy programmers. He slipped through one like a whisper of smoke.
His connection, now free, became a phantom. He wore the entire global network like a cloak of invisibility, bouncing his signal from a server in Europe, to a weather station in Antarctica, to a derelict satellite in dead orbit. His digital origin was now everywhere and nowhere. He was a true ghost in the machine.
He navigated the digital underworld until he reached his destination: a heavily encrypted forum known as the "Rift Watchers' Respite." A place for the real players in the war—the mercenaries, the disillusioned heroes, the information brokers—to speak the truth, far from the prying eyes of the guilds and government.
He initiated the new user registration. It asked for a handle. He settled on a name that was both a supreme irony and a simple statement of fact. A promise of the role he was about to play. Oracle.
'A fitting title for a god whispering truths to insects,' he thought with a flicker of amusement.
With his identity forged, it was time to plant the seed. He navigated to the "Abyssal Bestiary & Tactics" sub-forum. He paused, crafting the title with care. It had to be academic enough to sound credible, but boring enough that only the desperate or the truly discerning would read it. A perfect filter.
[Thread Title: A Theoretical Analysis on the Acoustic Resonance Vulnerability of Abyssal Shriekers]
He began to type, his tone deliberately clinical.
Greetings, fellow Watchers.
This post is a speculative analysis based on publicly available battle footage from the recent Sector 7 containment operation. The sonic attacks of the 'Abyssal Shriekers' are known to bypass spiritual shielding, but the mechanism is poorly defined.
My model suggests a potential structural flaw in their vocal organ—a previously uncatalogued resonance chamber.
Based on this model, a sustained counter-frequency, calculated to be precisely 27.3 kHz, should trigger a cascading bio-feedback loop within this chamber. This would not simply disrupt the attack; it would cause catastrophic cellular rupture in the vocal organ, effectively neutralizing the creature. The amplitude of the counter-frequency is less important than its precision.
For visual aid, I have attached a composite diagram of the theoretical vocal organ structure, sketched from enhanced footage.
This is purely a theoretical exercise.
Regards, Oracle.
He attached the image file—a diagram drawn with the anatomical precision of a master surgeon—and clicked "Post Thread."
The seed was planted. He calmly logged out, systematically erasing his digital footprints from the face of the earth. He walked back to his classroom just as the bell rang, a listless, failed teenager in the eyes of the world.
Meanwhile, his post appeared at the top of the forum. The first replies were immediate and dismissive.
IronFist88: "Another armchair general. Kid, go outside."
WindRunner: "27.3 kHz? That's oddly specific. Sounds like nonsense."
SnakeEyes: "New account. Zero post history. Troll. Ignore it."
But then, a fourth reply appeared from a user with a "Master Craftsman" tag.
Hephaestus: "Troll or not, the diagram is… interesting. The geometry is eerily efficient. Saving this image."
The wave of mockery faltered. The post remained on the front page, an object of curiosity.
Miles away, in a battered forward operating base, Captain Lin Mei of Squad Nomad stared at the haunted, empty eyes of her surviving teammate. Two of her squad were in the medical bay, their minds shattered by the Shriekers' attacks. Her squad was broken. Her morale was at rock bottom.
Desperate for any sliver of hope, she was scrolling through the Rift Watchers' forum on her tactical tablet. She ignored the bragging, the lies, the bluster.
Then, her gaze landed on a new thread. [A Theoretical Analysis on the Acoustic Resonance Vulnerability of Abyssal Shriekers]
She paused. Her finger hovered over the link. Her rational mind told her it was foolish. It was a trap. It was false hope. But the desperate, dying soldier in her heart whispered, 'What if?'
A desperate, foolish spark of hope flickered within her. She clicked it.