Under the calm of a Holy Resonance buff, Lu Jin extorts his landlord, sells a corporate backdoor to the black market, almost dies from the backlash—and gets marked by the chip's original owner.
The rusty security door finally creaked open.
On the other side, his landlady's face—caked in cheap foundation—was twisted with rage. Spit flew like aerosol as she drew a breath, ready to unleash the full "D-rank trash, get out of my apartment" combo she'd clearly rehearsed on the way up.
Then she met Lu Jin's eyes.
The words lodged in her throat.
This wasn't the sickly tenant who always kept his head down and mumbled apologies.
Lu Jin stood in the doorway, half in shadow. Behind his lenses, his eyes were dry, flat, and dead still—like two drained wells. No fear. No anger. Not even the irritated flinch of a normal person.
Under that gaze, the landlady had the unsettling illusion that she wasn't looking at a debtor.
She was being taken apart like data under a microscope.
"Lu Jin, you—" She tried to drag her voice back up to a shriek.
It came out thin and leaky.
Lu Jin didn't bother replying.
He just lifted his wrist and tapped his terminal. The cracked screen flickered, and a hologram sprang into the gloomy corridor.
The projection played her voice back at her—five full minutes of insults at max volume. Every word about "D-rank garbage," every slur, every time she jammed a spare key into his lock and tried to force her way in.
Right next to it, in bright, blood-red text, floated a legal clause.
[New Era Gene Federation Citizen Rights Protection Act]Article 11, Clause 3:Harassment, verbal abuse, or coercive violence against citizens of rank D or below is strictly prohibited.Violations will be recorded in the offender's social credit file, with mandatory downgrading.
"According to the Federation's credit algorithm," Lu Jin said, voice as flat as an autopsy report, "your current rating is C-standard."
"Once this recording—backed up in triplicate—is uploaded to the Mediation Tribunal, your rating will drop to C-minus within twenty-four hours."
He pushed his glasses up, eyes flicking briefly to her clenched jaw and the tendons in her neck.
"As far as I know, your son is applying to a B-rank public middle school next month. A guardian at C-minus?"
His tone didn't change.
"It's an automatic rejection."
Silence.
The corridor hummed with nothing but the faint zzzz of a dying sensor light and the landlady's ragged breathing.
"Y-You… you're threatening me?" Her face went a bruised purple. She jabbed a shaking finger at his nose, but even that looked more like reflex than courage.
"This is a transaction," Lu Jin said.
He dismissed the projection. The corridor plunged back into darkness.
"This month's rent: three thousand." His tone was almost gentle. "In exchange for the permanent deletion of the recording. You save money and keep your son's future."
With Song of Stillness still humming faintly in his nerves, pain and guilt were neatly muted, cut out of his decision tree.
For thirty minutes, he was a precision instrument built for survival.
The landlady stared at him, searching his bloodless face for some crack, some flicker of shame or fear.
She found nothing but that unnerving calm.
"…Fine." The word hissed through her teeth like steam.
She spat a last poisonous glare his way, then spun on her heel. Her cheap heels hammered down the stairs—clack, clack, clack—the rhythm just a little too fast, just a little too close to running.
Lu Jin watched her retreat until she vanished around the bend.
Then he closed the door and locked it with smooth, practiced movements.
First obstacle cleared.
There was no time to feel proud.
In the corner of his vision, numbers kept falling.
[Time Until Interest Accrual: 21:15:09][Outstanding Debt: ¥20,000.00]
Still short by twenty thousand.
Lu Jin pulled a black hood over his head, hiding half his face in shadow. He slid his terminal into his pocket and stepped out, leaving the rotten tang of mold and cheap instant noodles behind.
The alley outside smelled like burnt engine oil and regurgitated sewage.
On his way toward the black market, he opened Deep Space Echo.
The crystal storm was still howling outside on the wasteland side, but Blackstone Bunker sat solid and unmoving, its armor drinking in the barrage.
Warm light filled the foyer.
Li Xing stood in the center, bare feet on spotless flooring, wrapped in her torn lab coat. In her hands, she held an unopened strawberry-flavored nutrient bar upright like a ceremonial scepter, trying very hard to look imposing.
"Here… this has to stay clean," she said, pointing at a scuff on the floor. Her voice trembled, but the stubborn seriousness in it held.
In front of her, the old scavenger and Little Rock knelt like supplicants, too afraid to even look straight at the cheap robot vacuum buzzing in confused circles nearby.
Li Xing stole a glance at the invisible camera—at him.
Noticing his gaze, her shoulders slumped for a second, the tips of her ears turning pink. Then she visibly remembered she was supposed to be "in charge," forced her spine straight again, and lifted her "scepter" higher.
Watching her clumsily set rules in a world that had never given her anything but rules written in blood… oddly, it calmed him.
"Guard the house," Lu Jin thought.
Then he closed the feed.
By the time he looked up again, he was deep in Gray Rat Alley—the messiest knot of the lower city's black market.
A corroded maintenance hatch sat at the end of the alley. He raised his knuckles and knocked three times in a short pattern: long, long, short.
The hatch scraped open.
A wall of stale tobacco hit him in the face.
Inside, the cramped space was packed to the ceiling with gutted terminals, severed cables, and cracked casings. Several floating screens hovered in mid-air, flickering with lines of scrolling code and live feeds.
A bald man with a mechanical eye sat on a swivel chair in the middle of the junk heap, idly spinning a modified rail pistol on his finger.
The info broker of this sector.
Codename: Rat.
"D-rank?" Rat's mechanical eye whirred as it focused, casting a faint red glow across Lu Jin's chest where his ID badge would be. Contempt colored his voice. "I don't buy trash, kid. Unless you're here to sell your organs."
On any other day, under that lazy, predatory gaze and the casual gun barrel pointed his way, Lu Jin's body would have answered with panic—spikes of adrenaline, choking coughs, lungs on fire.
Right now, his heartbeat was a straight line.
"I'm not selling organs." Lu Jin stepped over a pile of scrap, ignoring the gun completely. "I'm selling lives."
He stopped at the workbench and set a folded sheet of paper down with a soft thap.
Rat's mechanical eye pulsed, curious despite itself.
Lu Jin unfolded the page.
A circuit diagram stared back—lines so clean they might have been printed.
"This is the core architecture of Thor Industrial's latest military-grade neural conduit chip," Lu Jin said, nudging it across the table. "While I was repairing the one at Old John's today, I fixed it… and copied the low-level logic backdoor while I was in there."
"Call it… technical recycling."
He tapped a specific node on the drawing.
"If you inject a pulse of this exact frequency here, that three-hundred-thousand-yuan chip will fry itself instantly."
Rat's eye lens snapped into sharp focus. He snatched the page up, flesh eye and red lens both locked onto the network of lines.
His breathing changed.
"How," he rasped after a long moment, "could a D-rank know this?"
"I told you." Lu Jin repeated the line he'd used earlier that day, voice still calm. "I'm a precision instrument built to feel pain."
"These chips are already circulating on the black market. Once this leak goes public, Thor Industrial's compensation claims will be… impressive."
He shrugged.
"Or you can sell it to Thor's competitors. Up to you."
Rat went quiet.
He was calculating. Weighing risk versus payout. Mapping routes in the dark.
In those few seconds, Lu Jin could feel Song of Stillness thinning out, the golden calm fraying at the edges. Static crawled into his peripheral vision. The familiar burn in his lungs began to creep back, like embers waking under ash.
Time was leaking away.
"Twenty-five thousand," Lu Jin said, cutting into Rat's silence. "Cash. Now."
Rat stared at him.
The red light of the mechanical eye pulsed a few times, then sank into a deeper, colder shade.
"…Deal." His voice was hoarse.
He opened a drawer and pulled out a packet of old bills wrapped in oiled paper. As Lu Jin reached for it, Rat's knuckles pinned the edge of the bundle to the table.
His next words were barely audible over the hum of broken fans and half-alive circuits.
"Take the money," Rat muttered. "Then forget this door. Forget my face."
He lifted his head, meeting Lu Jin's gaze with his remaining human eye.
No threat there.
Just a bone-deep weariness Lu Jin recognized from reflective surfaces.
"And kid," Rat added, "if you ever get some kind of 'anonymous blessing' in your inbox…"
His lips thinned.
"Run. Don't look back."
He let go of the money and turned his chair, disappearing back into the glow of his floating screens as if Lu Jin had never been there.
By the time Lu Jin stepped out of Gray Rat Alley, his account was up by ¥25,000.
His body was bankrupt.
He had one foot beyond the alley's shadow when the invisible chord in his head snapped.
[BUFF: Song of Stillness (Minor) – Expired.]
A grunt tore itself through his teeth.
Half an hour of anesthetized nerves went rogue all at once.
His lungs turned into a cage of red-hot needles. Every breath felt like it was peeling skin off the inside of his chest. His spine lit up vertebra by vertebra, as if someone were grinding them to powder between iron fingers.
His knees buckled.
He crashed down into a filthy puddle, palms slapping against cold, oily water.
"Kh… kha—"
The coughing fit hit like a hammer.
Warm liquid spilled between his fingers, splattering into the puddle below and blooming into dark, accusing flowers on the surface.
His vision smeared. A high, piercing whine drilled into his ears, drowning out the city.
This was the price.
A mortal shell trying to carry god-level clarity.
Pain demanded its interest in blood.
Just as his consciousness tilted toward the drop, his phone buzzed in his pocket.
The screen lit with soft gold.
Deep Space Echo opened on its own.
On the wasteland feed, Li Xing had just finished handing out food—nutrient paste squeezed onto ration biscuits. Little Rock and the old man, who had shivered in the storm hours ago, now sat under warm light, eating like they were afraid the meal would vanish if they blinked.
They weren't smiling.
They were just… still.
Safe.
Li Xing watched them for a long moment, something tender and unfamiliar flickering in her eyes.
Home, Lu Jin thought.
That's what that looks like.
That's what it means to guard something.
She turned, looking up toward his invisible vantage point.
Then she began to hum.
It wasn't the mourning song she'd used over countless corpses in the lab.
This melody was steadier. Fierce and gentle all at once.
A song for standing watch.
[Detected: Strong Emotional Resonance – "Guardianship" + "Contentment"!][Holy Resonance Energy Gained: 15][Warning: Host is at the brink of collapse. Auto-converting energy to "Pain Suppression (Medium)."]
A denser stream of golden light than he'd ever seen pushed through the screen, diving straight into his clenched chest like liquid anesthetic.
The kind of agony that short-circuited thought dulled, then folded in on itself, pressed down beneath the golden weight.
Lu Jin dragged in a breath that didn't taste like broken glass.
Color crept back into his face. His fingers stopped clawing helplessly at the pavement. He wiped the blood off his mouth with the back of his hand, then glanced at the screen again.
The girl hummed on, unaware that her song had just yanked a dying man back from the edge.
His lips twisted into something between a grin and a snarl.
"Thanks… kid," he muttered.
He hauled himself upright using the wall, legs shaking, then opened Deep Space Echo's loan interface.
He transferred exactly ¥20,000 to the glowing red debt figure.
[Payment Received. High-Interest "Divine Grace" Loan Cleared.][Congratulations! As a loyal, trustworthy debtor, your emergency "God's Favor" credit limit has been raised to ¥50,000! Withdraw anytime—rise to godhood faster!]
He stared at the saccharine pop-up, too tired to even swear.
His personal terminal buzzed again.
A new window opened—no system branding, no source ID. Encrypted. Anonymous.
[We got your little chip secret. Cute.][Its original owner knows it was you who sold it, too.][Good luck, D-rank trash.]
The message faded, leaving nothing but his reflection in the dark screen and the faint red smear at the corner of his mouth.
The alley wind knifed under his hood.
Lu Jin's eyes were colder than the night.
"So," he breathed.
The countdowns were still ticking.
Enemies, visible and invisible, were taking note.
And somewhere out there, a corporate monster with a missing chip had just turned his name into a target.
"The real game…" His fingers tightened around the phone until the casing creaked.
"…is finally starting."