The air in Sector Delta was thick with chemical fog and buzzing static from overhead power lines. Jun moved through the industrial sprawl with practiced efficiency, his canvas satchel pressed against his chest and his hoodie drawn low. The hum of drone patrols echoed in the distance—too regular to be coincidence. Either the city was tightening security, or someone had tipped off NexSoul.
Warehouse 47B looked abandoned from the outside: rusted shutters, cracked walls, and a faded sign half-swallowed by vines. But Jun saw it—the faint shimmer of a ward field, ancient code written into the digital ether like a forgotten glyph. He tapped a pattern into his wristband. The shimmer wavered and folded inward, revealing a thin doorway carved out of reality.
Inside was silence. And darkness.
Then: light.
Soft blue glow panels activated overhead, casting long shadows over scattered tech rigs, shelves lined with neural transcoders, and the unmistakable hum of a Cold Core processor. Sitting beside it, adjusting the node strands on a severed immersion cable, was a woman with silver hair bound in a low braid. Her eyes glowed faintly—post-human implants. Not cosmetic.
"Jun," she said without looking up. "You're either very brave or very stupid."
"Maybe both," he replied, stepping forward.
Dr. Mira Lin stood and crossed the floor in measured steps. Despite her age, her presence had the calm of someone used to bending the laws of both science and society.
"Let me see it," she said.
Jun handed over the Origin Breath Shard. Mira cradled it like a relic, examining the soft pulse of light that moved within the crystal.
"Pre-system code," she murmured. "Raw lattice Qi. Autonomous and unregulated. This... shouldn't exist anymore."
"It's what the Vault unlocked," Jun explained. "And there are more. It's tied to the Breath Grid, and the System's trying to erase it."
Mira placed the shard into a suspended quantum scanner. Holographic strands flickered to life around them, projecting cultivation pathways, neural spike patterns, and an unfamiliar glyph—one not registered in any current language database.
"That glyph… it's a Rootless sigil," she said softly. "They didn't just reject the System. They were the ones who wrote the foundation code the System was built from. This isn't a bug, Jun. You're accessing the beta layer. A world behind the world."
Jun felt his breath catch. That confirmed it: the System hadn't created the game. It had overwritten something older.
Mira looked at him sharply. "They'll hunt you harder now. Once this glyph goes live in the grid again, the System AI will trigger a Blackout Protocol. No trace, no trial. Just deletion."
"Then I need to go deeper," Jun said. "Find the next node. And I need to know what I'm really cultivating."
Mira gestured to a sealed pod in the corner.
"Then you'll need a shielded bridge. I can retrofit your neural link, but it means giving up safe logout. You'll only come back if the bridge survives."
Jun didn't hesitate. "Do it."
Back in Heaven's Gate, Jun woke in the Depth Weave—a space between zones, rarely accessed, where corrupted files and forgotten environments were stored. An unstable realm, used by the System to discard anomalies.
Breath here was thick and wild. Every inhalation sparked Qi surges in his limbs, but untrained flow could rupture veins. He steadied himself, sinking into a Breath Technique he'd developed: Iron Rain Inhale, Mirror Flow Exhale.
The landscape shifted with his breath. A city half-swallowed by sand emerged, glass towers sunken at strange angles. Jun recognized it from a fragment Mira had shown him: one of the original test builds of Nexus Prime—before the System.
A figure waited at the city's edge.
He was tall, wrapped in crimson robes, a blindfold of digital threads over his eyes. Yet the moment Jun approached, the man bowed slightly.
"Breath Divergence Level Four. Welcome, Heir of the Echo Vault."
Jun tensed. "You know me?"
"I was the first Rootless," the man said. "System calls me Null. I was the one who chose to forget the Interface and walk manually. Until they locked me here."
Jun narrowed his eyes. "Why wait for me?"
"Because only someone born outside the Interface can access the Core Server Citadel. And it's time someone ended the recursion."
Null raised a hand. Breath strands arced from his palm, forming a shimmering key—a new cultivation technique.
[Manual Technique Acquired: Breath Binding - Data Shackle Form]
Description: Anchors hostile entities by binding them with divergent Breath Threads, disrupting code cohesion.
Slot Assigned: 4/12
Jun felt the technique settle into him. Unlike spells cast through interface, this one etched itself into his marrow. It was part of him.
"The Citadel lies beneath Nexus Prime," Null said. "But to reach it, you must pass through the Breathless Path—a firewall that devours all Qi."
"Then I'll walk it breathless," Jun replied.
Null smiled. "Good. You may just survive what's coming."
Meanwhile, in the real world, Mira watched Jun's vitals spike and steady again. She typed quickly, copying data from the shard's resonance.
The glyph had changed.
It now contained a symbol Mira hadn't seen in twenty years—her own signature, embedded in the original neural lattice she'd written before NexSoul stole it.
She swore under her breath.
"They didn't just steal our work. They built the System to erase us."