The air in Qin Mo's room seemed to crystallize, the temperature dropping by several degrees. The faint, ambient hum of the city's digital network, a sound that had become as natural as breathing to him, fell silent in his perception. All of it—the 99,999 other lives, the endless stream of cosmic data, the fate of distant galaxies—vanished.
His entire, vast consciousness focused with the intensity of a collapsing star onto a single line of text on his mental screen.
[Candidate Name: Su Liying][Genetic Marker: 99.7% compatibility with 'Weaver of Fates' entity.][Status: High Priority. To be observed. Acquisition authorized upon graduation.]
Vessel.
Sacrifice.
The words echoed in the silent, ancient chambers of his soul. For a hundred years, humanity had fought the Abyss. For a decade, he had silently observed this world, analyzing it, preparing his plans with the cold, detached logic of a god playing a game of cosmic chess. He had viewed Prometheus as a distasteful but predictable variable, a cancer to be excised with surgical precision at the optimal moment.
He had been wrong. They were not a cancer. They were a virus that had just targeted the very heart of his own world.
A flicker of an emotion he had not truly felt in a thousand lifetimes—across all his avatars—ignited within him. It was not the hot, thoughtless rage of a teenager. It was a cold, silent, and absolute fury. The fury of an emperor whose most prized treasure has been eyed by a common thief. The fury of a god who has just watched an insect attempt to desecrate his holy ground.
'Vessel?' The thought was not a question. It was a judgment, a sentence passed in the highest court of his mind. 'They dare? This insignificant collection of deluded, suicidal insects... dares to lay claim on what is MINE to protect?'
His consciousness plunged back into the library of his avatars. He was no longer just observing. He was searching. He sifted through the memories of tyrants who had crushed rebellions, of assassins who had toppled empires, of ancient generals who had waged wars across entire star systems. He was gathering every ounce of strategic ruthlessness, every method of absolute, overwhelming warfare he had ever witnessed.
The game was no longer about winning. It was about total, unconditional extermination.
In the digital sanctum of [Channel: Zero], the inner circle was still discussing the success of Operation Forgebreaker and their new, noble mission of acting as a sanctuary for the hunted.
Old-Man-Jiang: "The 'Sanctuary' initiative is already bearing fruit. Dozens of independent hunters have sought refuge under the Alliance's banner. Our numbers and influence grow by the hour."
Suddenly, Oracle came online. His presence felt different. The usual aura of calm, detached omniscience had been replaced by something else. Something colder. Heavier. A pressure that seemed to suck the very air out of the virtual room.
He immediately interrupted their discussion with a new, absolute directive.
Oracle: The sanctuary initiative will proceed. However, a new, overriding primary objective has been identified. All other operations are now secondary.
Old-Man-Jiang: "Oracle? What's happened? What did you find in the Forge's data?"
Oracle: The Prometheus Initiative's ultimate goal is more monstrous than we imagined. Their 'Project Chimera' is not an experiment. It is the preparation for a ceremony. A sacrifice. And they have already chosen their offering.
He did not reveal Su Liying's name. That was a secret he would protect with the fire of a dying star.
Oracle: Our previous strategy of slow sabotage and long-term intelligence gathering is now obsolete. The timeline has been accelerated indefinitely. The new grand strategy is simple: Annihilation.
The word landed in the channel with the force of a physical blow.
Nomad-Lead: "Annihilation? Oracle, that means all-out, open war. We don't have the numbers to fight them head-on..."
Oracle: You are thinking of a war of attrition. I am speaking of a war of extermination. Oracle: We will not cripple them. We will not absorb them. We will erase them from the face of this planet.
The sheer, brutal finality of the statement stunned them into silence. The benevolent, strategic Oracle they knew had vanished, replaced by a ruthless god of war.
A new file was uploaded to the channel. It was a map of the entire Tianxia Concord, but now, dozens of locations—corporate headquarters, private residences, hidden warehouses, government offices—were marked in a pulsing, blood-red light.
Oracle: This is a complete, real-time list of every known Prometheus Initiative asset, safe house, financial institution, and political ally in this Concord. All of it. Oracle: You have one month. You will use the full, unrestrained might of the Oracle Alliance to dismantle this entire network. I will provide the targets. You will provide the fire.
The first bounty of this new, total war appeared on the Alliance's main board. It was not a complex plan. It was a death sentence.
[PRIORITY-OMEGA BOUNTY: Operation Serpent's Head]
[OBJECTIVE: Eliminate the Sector Chief of the Tianxia Concord's Prometheus branch. His name is Wei Tang. He is currently located at his private villa at these coordinates. Attached is a full analysis of his security detail, their spiritual abilities, and their psychological weaknesses.]
[RULES OF ENGAGEMENT: None. Burn it all to the ground.]
The inner circle understood. Oracle was no longer playing a game of chess. He had just flipped the entire board over and set it on fire.
While his commanders began to frantically mobilize the Alliance for this brutal new campaign, Qin Mo performed a small, personal act of war. He focused on the captured assassin, 'Specter,' still languishing in the Dragon's Maw black site. With a flicker of his will, he wove together a perfect, undeniable file of evidence from the Prometheus servers—a record of how the disgraced official Guan Shan had deliberately sabotaged government hunter teams for years.
He sent the file as an anonymous, untraceable data-burst directly to the terminal of the black site's chief interrogator.
The government, now armed with proof of the deepest betrayal, would turn their full, paranoid fury upon anyone even remotely suspected of being a Prometheus sympathizer. He had just ignited a second, internal war within his enemy's own allies.
The next day at school, Su Liying felt a strange chill in the air, a sense of foreboding she couldn't explain. She tried to act normal, to continue her silent game of observation with Qin Mo, but his stillness felt different today. It was heavier. Colder.
As she was walking home, her mind preoccupied, a speeding cargo truck, its driver slumped over the wheel, suddenly swerved, its horn blaring. It jumped the curb, barreling directly towards her.
Time seemed to slow down. She saw the massive grille of the truck, the crazed look in the driver's eyes—not drunk, but possessed, a faint purple glow within them. A Prometheus-controlled puppet. An assassination attempt.
She was an A-Rank, but she was a healer and an analyst, not a combatant. She froze, her mind unable to process the sudden, overwhelming violence.
Before she could even scream, the thick, steel traffic light pole she was standing beside made a sound like a groaning giant. With a deafening shriek of tearing metal, the pole bent at its base, as if struck by an invisible, colossal hand. It swung down, crashing into the hood of the speeding truck with the force of a meteor strike.
CRUNCH!
The truck's front end was obliterated, the vehicle screeching to a halt inches from her feet, its engine dying with a final, pathetic hiss.
It looked like a one-in-a-billion freak accident.
Su Liying stared at the impossible wreckage, her heart hammering in her chest. A block away, hidden in the shadows of an alley, Qin Mo lowered his hand. A faint aura of kinetic energy, identical to his sister's but a thousand times more dense and controlled, dissipated around him.
His Sanctuary Protocol had just been upgraded from passive defense to active, violent, and absolute intervention. The war had come to his home. And he would not let them touch what was his.