The war had paused for the dawn. The first wave of Oracle's blitzkrieg had been a terrifying success, sending the Prometheus Initiative reeling, their regional network shattered and bleeding. In the digital war rooms of the Alliance, there was a sense of grim, electric triumph.
But in his quiet bedroom, Qin Mo was not focused on the victory. He was focused on a single line of text that had appeared in a private channel, a message from his Chief Analyst.
> Crystalline_Mind: ...Is this really the only way?
The question was a profound anomaly. In all his 99,999 lives, across countless wars and apocalypses, he had rarely encountered such a question from a subordinate in the midst of a successful campaign. His avatars were emperors, generals, assassins, gods. Their followers obeyed. They did not question the morality of a necessary storm.
But Su Liying was different. He had chosen her for her intellect, but he was beginning to understand that her empathy—the very quality that made her human—was her true, unique strength. It was a variable he had not fully accounted for, and it demanded an answer.
He could have ignored it. He could have given a cold, logical reply about strategic necessity. But he knew, with a certainty that was both alien and deeply familiar, that his answer to her mattered. She was not just an asset. She was his partner. And a partnership required trust. Trust required understanding.
He waited until the quietest hours of the night, when the digital chatter of the city had faded to a low hum, when he knew she would be alone with her thoughts. Then, he opened the private, encrypted channel between Oracle and Crystalline_Mind.
Su Liying was in her room, staring at the after-action reports scrolling across her screen. She saw the confirmed kills, the destroyed facilities, the captured assets. They were victories. She knew, logically, that they were necessary victories against a monstrous enemy. But her empathic soul felt the echoes of the violence, the ripples of fear and death, and she felt a profound weight settle upon her.
Her terminal chimed. It was him.
Oracle: I have received your query. Oracle: It is the most important question a commander can ask. It is the question that separates a soldier from a butcher.
Su Liying's breath caught. He wasn't dismissing her. He was taking her seriously.
Oracle: You ask if there is another way. Let me answer with an analogy. Oracle: The Prometheus Initiative is not a rival nation to be negotiated with, nor is it a simple criminal enterprise to be imprisoned. It is a cancerous tumor, growing on the very heart of humanity. Its ideology is a sickness that corrupts everything it touches. You do not reason with a tumor. You do not show it mercy, for it has none to show you in return. You cut it out. The process is brutal, violent, and bloody. But it is not cruelty. It is surgery. It is salvation.
His words were cold, clinical, but they carried an undeniable, chilling logic.
Oracle: You are a historian, Chief Analyst, so you understand patterns. Allow me to share a piece of history from my private archives.
He began to tell a story. He spoke of a world, light-years away, that had faced a similar internal threat—a cult that sought to embrace a world-ending plague. The leaders of that world, compassionate and merciful, chose to negotiate. They imprisoned the cult's leaders instead of executing them. They tried to re-educate their followers. Ten years later, the cult feigned surrender, was granted amnesty, and then, from the inside, they unleashed the very plague they worshipped.
Oracle: The price of their mercy was ten billion lives and a dead planet. A price paid in the currency of good intentions. Oracle: I have witnessed a thousand apocalypses, Chief Analyst. I have seen civilizations fall for a multitude of reasons. But the most common, the most tragic, is a failure to act with absolute decisiveness against a threat that seeks only total annihilation. Oracle: Our methods are brutal because the alternative is planetary extinction. My ruthlessness is not born of anger. It is born of a calculation that spans the ashes of a thousand dead worlds. It is the only way to guarantee a future where your question does not even need to be asked.
Su Liying read his words, a profound shiver running down her spine. She was not conversing with a man. She was receiving a lesson from a being of ancient, terrible experience. The weight of his burden, the things he must have seen to arrive at such a grim philosophy, was unimaginable. Her empathy, which had recoiled at the violence, now extended to the one who had ordered it.
Crystalline_Mind: I... I understand. It is a heavy burden to carry.
Oracle: Which is why I have entrusted the analysis of our war to you. Your empathy is not a weakness to be suppressed; it is the most critical tool we possess. It is our compass. You will be the one to ensure we remain surgeons, not butchers. You will be the one to tell me when the cancer is cut out, and when the healing can begin. That is your most important duty.
He had not just answered her question. He had given her a new, sacred responsibility. He had made her his conscience.
The conversation had fundamentally shifted their dynamic. It was no longer a silent game of observation and acknowledgment. It was a true partnership, built on a new, profound level of trust.
And as a sign of that trust, he gave her something more. Something that went beyond strategy and the war.
Oracle: The conflict is escalating. To be an effective commander, you must understand the full scope of the variables at play. Including the primary one.
A new, single, heavily encrypted file was uploaded to their private channel. Its title was simple. [File: Genesis.dat]
Oracle: This data is not for the Analysis Core. It is not for the Inner Circle. It is for your eyes only. It is the original, unredacted government and medical case file regarding my own 'Awakening'. The one from the park, ten years ago.
Su Liying stared at the file name, her world tilting on its axis. He was giving her the key. The answer to the mystery that had consumed her for months. The truth behind the boy who was a god. It was the ultimate sign of trust, a secret more profound and dangerous than any battle plan.
She hesitated for a long, heart-stopping moment, her finger hovering over the decrypt command. She knew, with absolute certainty, that her life would be irrevocably divided into two parts: the time before she opened this file, and the time after.
She chose the truth.
Her screen began to fill with the cold, official text of a decade-old police report about a "freak micro-Rift incident" in a suburban park. She saw the medical logs detailing the three minutes and seventeen seconds of clinical death. She saw the name of the eight-year-old boy who had died.
And she began to read about the day that Qin Mo, as she knew him, had ceased to exist.