**Chapter 37: The Slum Fortress**
The welding torch spat a glob of molten iron onto Su Yuan's boot. He didn't flinch. He just watched the metal cool from angry orange to a dull, crusted grey.
"Flux is bad," Old Man Chen grunted, adjusting his goggles. "Mixture's off. Too much sulfur in the air."
"Make it hold," Su Yuan said. He stood with his arms crossed, staring up at the monstrosity they were birthing in the center of Sector 7's plaza.
It was ugly. It was a twenty-foot spire of scavenged rebar, copper coil, and stolen fiber-optics, all welded onto the chassis of a derelict heavy-lifter droid. It looked like a radio tower built by a lunatic in a junkyard.
Which was exactly what it was.
"It ain't gonna win no beauty contests," Chen muttered, tapping the structure with a wrench. The sound rang out, hollow and flat against the ambient noise of the slums. "But the geometry is right. Same parabolic curve as the Spire's repeaters, just... grittier."
"Connect it," Su Yuan ordered.
Chen spit on the ground, then yanked a lever.
The machine groaned. The coils at the base began to hum—a low, tooth-rattling vibration that worked its way up through the soles of Su Yuan's boots. The copper windings glowed with a faint, sickly heat.
**[ SYSTEM ALERT: SIGNAL REPEATER ONLINE. ]**
**[ LOCAL AREA NETWORK: EXPANDED. ]**
**[ MASKING PROTOCOL: ACTIVE. ]**
Su Yuan closed his eyes.
The sensation was immediate. The static that usually scratched at the edges of his mind—the constant, probing radar of the Spire's surveillance grid—dropped away. It was like stepping out of a wind tunnel into a quiet room.
The 'Soul Pylon' was working. It was taking the chaotic, noisy spiritual signatures of the slum dwellers and scrambling them, bouncing the data around inside a localized loop before bleeding it out into the atmosphere as white noise. To the government satellites overhead, Sector 7 was no longer a cluster of rebels. It was a dead zone. A smudge on the lens.
"That's one," Su Yuan said, opening his eyes. "We need twelve more."
"Twelve?" Chen wiped grease across his forehead, leaving a black smear. "Boss, we stripped three blocks just to build this one. We're out of copper. We're out of capacitors. Hell, we're out of welding gas."
"Strip the hydration pumps if you have to," Su Yuan said. He turned away, scanning the perimeter. "The Spire isn't going to wait for us to go shopping."
The plaza was busy. Not with commerce, but with the frantic, terrified energy of preparation. Under Goran's heavy-handed supervision, gangs were piling sandbags—filled with pulverized concrete and trash—at the major intersections. Children were running messages. The air smelled of burning rubber and fear.
Su Yuan checked his internal clock.
*Six hours since the broadcast.*
Six hours since his face had been plastered on every screen in the city. The initial panic of the residents had settled into a grim, fatalistic resolve. They weren't fighting for him. They were fighting because they knew the Spire didn't take prisoners in a purge.
"Architect!"
Li Wei came running from the command tent, a tablet clutched in his hands like a shield. He tripped over a coil of wire, caught himself, and skidded to a halt.
"Problem," Li Wei wheezed.
"They found the frequency?" Su Yuan asked.
"Worse. Look."
Li Wei shoved the tablet into Su Yuan's hands. It showed a utility diagnostic of the Lower City.
Usually, the grid was a mess of green and yellow lines, representing the trickle of power and water the Upper City deigned to send down.
Now, the lines were black.
"They cut it," Li Wei said, his voice trembling. "Five minutes ago. Main breakers at the district junction. Power is gone. Water pressure is dropping to zero."
As if on cue, the floodlights that illuminated the plaza flickered and died.
A collective gasp went up from the crowd. The darkness wasn't absolute—there were chemical flares, battery lanterns, and the bioluminescent fungus that grew in the gutters—but the heavy, industrial hum of the ventilation fans stopped.
That was the killer.
Without the fans, the air in Sector 7 didn't move. It sat heavy and hot, pooling with carbon dioxide and methane.
"They're not sending troops," Li Wei whispered. "They're suffocating us. They're going to wait until we pass out and then sweep the bodies."
Su Yuan looked up at the sky. Through the gaps in the smog, he couldn't see the sun, but he could see the distant, mocking glitter of the Upper City. The lights up there were blazing. Heated pools. Climate control. Infinite energy.
"How long on the batteries?" Su Yuan asked.
"For the Pylon?" Li Wei calculated rapidly. "Maybe two hours. Once the Pylon dies, the masking drops. Then the drones paint targets, and the orbital railguns finish the job."
Panic began to ripple through the SoulNet.
It started as a murmur in the back of Su Yuan's skull.
*...dark... can't breathe...*
*...water's dry... baby needs water...*
*...give him up... give the Architect to them, maybe they turn it back on...*
The thought was cancerous. It spread fast. Su Yuan felt the loyalty of the nodes wavering. A hungry man might fight, but a thirsty man in the dark would bargain.
He needed to act. Not with a speech. You couldn't eat speeches.
"Chen," Su Yuan said. The darkness made his voice sound louder. "Can this Pylon transmit power?"
Chen laughed, a harsh, dry bark. "Transmit? It's a repeater, boss. It eats power. It doesn't make it."
"I didn't ask if it made it," Su Yuan said. "I asked if it could move it."
He walked over to the base of the spire. He placed his hand on the cold iron.
"We have the SoulNet. It connects eleven thousand people. It's a neural grid. But it's also a conduit."
He looked at Li Wei.
"The Upper City grid runs on magnetic resonance, right? Wireless transmission for their fancy hovering towers."
"Yeah," Li Wei said. "But it's encrypted. Shielded. And it's three miles up. The attenuation would be—"
"The air is full of energy," Su Yuan interrupted. "They flood the atmosphere with it so their drones never have to land. It's thickest up there, but it bleeds down here. We call it static. We call it interference."
Su Yuan turned to the crowd. Hundreds of eyes reflected the weak light of the chemical flares. They looked gaunt, terrified.
"They turned off the switch," Su Yuan announced. His voice wasn't amplified by speakers, but he pushed it through the Net, making it resonate in their inner ears. "They think that because they own the generator, they own the light."
He gripped the iron strut of the Pylon.
"System," he subvocalized. "Deduce new skill. Parameters: Wireless Energy Harvesting. Source: Ambient City Grid. Medium: Human Soul."
**[ ANALYZING... ]**
**[ WARNING: REQUEST EXCEEDS STANDARD PHYSICS PARAMETERS. ]**
**[ SUGGESTION: UTILIZE SOULNET AS ANTENNA ARRAY. ]**
**[ CALCULATING SUCCESS RATE... 14%. ]**
**[ RISK: NEURAL BURNOUT. ]**
"Do it," Su Yuan snapped. "Optimize for mass distribution. Rank F. Keep it simple."
**[ DEDUCTION COMPLETE. ]**
**[ NEW SKILL CREATED: ETHER SIPHON (RANK F). ]**
**[ DESCRIPTION: ALLOWS USER TO ACT AS A CONDUCTIVE ROD FOR AMBIENT ELECTROMAGNETIC ENERGY. ]**
Su Yuan felt the knowledge slot into his brain. It was crude. It was essentially turning the human nervous system into a copper wire. It would hurt.
He pushed the data packet outward.
**[ UPLOADING SKILL TO LOCAL NODES (11,502)... ]**
Every person in the plaza flinched simultaneously. It was a sharp, sudden headache, like an icepick behind the eyes.
"What did you do?" Goran growled, rubbing his temple.
"I gave you a straw," Su Yuan said. "Now drink."
He raised his hand, pointing at the Pylon.
"Use the skill. Target the air. Pull."
He demonstrated. He activated [Ether Siphon].
It felt like sticking a fork in a socket, but in reverse. He reached out with his mind, not into the SoulNet, but into the empty, dead air around him. He felt for the hum of the city above—the waste energy radiating from the Upper City's excess.
He grabbed it.
*Zap.*
A spark of blue electricity arced from his fingertip to the Pylon.
"Pull!" Su Yuan roared.
Li Wei was the first to get it. He squeezed his eyes shut. A moment later, a faint crackle of static electricity danced over his hair. A thin, wavering line of blue light jumped from his shoulder to the metal tower.
Then Chen. Then Goran.
Then the crowd.
It wasn't graceful. It was messy, desperate theft. Eleven thousand starving souls reaching up into the sky and grabbing what they were owed.
The air in the plaza began to hiss. The smell of ozone overpowered the stench of rot.
Thousands of tiny, blue arcs streamed from the people—from their hands, their eyes, their chests—feeding into the Pylon.
The machine screamed. The copper coils didn't just glow; they flared blinding white.
"Capacity reached!" Chen shouted over the roar of electricity. "Where do I send it?"
"The grid!" Su Yuan yelled. "Backfeed the sector! Force it open!"
Chen slammed the breaker switch.
*BOOM.*
It sounded like a cannon shot.
The floodlights exploded back to life, brighter than before, burning with a fierce, unstable violet hue.
The ventilation fans kicked on with a screech of tortured metal, spinning so fast they rattled in their housings.
In the hab-blocks surrounding the plaza, windows lit up. Not just lights. Old heaters, broken screens, dormant fabricators—everything surged on at once.
"It's too much!" Li Wei covered his ears. "The voltage is spiking!"
"We aren't just powering the lights," Su Yuan said, his eyes reflecting the violet storm. "We're draining *them*."
***
**Three Miles Above.**
In the control room of the Spire's Energy Division, the atmosphere was sterile and calm. Technicians in white suits monitored the flow of terawatts with the boredom of gods.
Then, the alarms started.
"Sector 7 is dark," the lead technician said, sipping his coffee. "As ordered."
"No, sir," a junior analyst said, frowning at her screen. "I'm reading a surge. A massive one."
"Residual capacitance?"
"No. It's... it's a draw. A parasitic draw."
On the main wall screen, the pristine blue lines of the Upper City grid flickered.
The lights in the control room dipped. The coffee maker gurgled and died.
"We're losing pressure in the mag-lev lines," the analyst shouted, panic creeping into her voice. "Sectors 1 through 3 are experiencing brownouts. Something is eating the power."
"Trace it!"
"It's coming from below. It's... it's everywhere down there. It looks like the entire slum just turned into a magnet."
***
**Sector 7. The Rooftops.**
Su Yuan stood on the edge of the tallest tenement building. The wind whipped his hair across his face.
Below him, the slums were no longer a dark pit. They were a constellation of violet anger. The Pylons—the others were coming online now, fed by the frantic energy of the awakened populace—pulsed like heartbeats.
He checked his display.
**[ ENERGY RESERVES: 200% ]**
**[ SOULNET SYNCHRONIZATION: 98% ]**
The panic was gone. Replaced by a manic, electric high. The [Ether Siphon] had a side effect Su Yuan hadn't anticipated: it felt good. Drawing power from the oppressors felt like vengeance.
"Boss," Li Wei's voice crackled over the comms. "Radar contact. We have bogeys."
Su Yuan looked north.
They were coming.
Not the sleek white drones of the police. These were heavy shapes, blotting out the stars. Troop carriers. Riot suppression mechs. The Spire had realized that starvation wouldn't work.
They were coming to break the toys that had learned to bite.
Su Yuan didn't run. He adjusted the cuffs of his ruined suit.
"Let them come," he said.
He reached out to the SoulNet.
*Attention.*
The response was instant. Eleven thousand minds snapped to attention. They were high on voltage and adrenaline. They were waiting for a command.
Su Yuan looked at the approaching armada.
"Target the lead ship," Su Yuan whispered.
He didn't need to shout. The thought was the trigger.
Down in the streets, thousands of hands pointed upward. Thousands of users activated [Ether Siphon], but this time, they didn't pull from the air.
They pulled from the specific electromagnetic signature Su Yuan highlighted in their minds.
*Drain.*
The lead troop carrier, a massive slab of gunmetal and thrusters, suddenly lurched.
Its navigation lights blew out. Its anti-gravity engines stuttered.
The pilot fought the controls, but physics was against him. The energy required to keep sixty tons of steel in the air was suddenly being sucked away by ten thousand tiny mouths.
The engine note dropped from a whine to a moan.
Then silence.
The ship dropped like a stone.
It smashed into a derelict warehouse on the edge of the sector, erupting in a fireball that lit up the low-hanging clouds.
Su Yuan watched the flames reflect in the glass of a broken window nearby.
He wasn't a student anymore. He wasn't even a mechanic.
He looked at his hands. They were trembling, not from fear, but from the sheer, overwhelming volume of power coursing through the network.
"Li Wei," Su Yuan said.
"Yeah, Boss?" Li Wei sounded terrified. "Did we just... shoot down a frigate?"
"We didn't shoot it," Su Yuan said. "We grounded it."
He turned his back on the burning wreckage.
"Tell Goran to ready the welcoming committee. The crash survivors will be angry."
Su Yuan walked toward the stairwell.
"And Li Wei?"
"Yes?"
"Start drafting a new blueprint."
"For what?"
Su Yuan smiled. It was a cold, sharp expression.
"For a battery that shoots back."
**[ GENESIS PROTOCOL: OBSERVATION LOG UPDATED. ]**
**[ SUBJECT: SU YUAN. ]**
**[ STATUS CHANGE: FROM ANOMALY TO RIVAL. ]**
**[ THREAT LEVEL: RECALCULATING... ]**