**Chapter 41: Dive into the Deep Web**
The smell of sewage vanished first.
One moment, Su Yuan was drowning in the filth of Sector 7, the taste of copper and rot coating his tongue, the cold water rising against his chest.
The next, he was nowhere.
The transition wasn't like falling asleep. It was like being pulled through the eye of a needle. Space inverted. The concept of *up* and *down* shattered and didn't bother to reassemble. There was a violent, tearing sensation, not in his flesh, but in the idea of himself.
Then, the noise hit him.
It wasn't sound. Sound requires air, vibration, an ear to catch it. This was raw data crashing against his consciousness. A billion conversations, a trillion transactions, the hum of the city's power grid, the heartbeat of the internet. It screamed.
Su Yuan opened eyes he no longer possessed.
He stood on a plane of obsidian glass that stretched into infinity. Above him, the sky was a bruised violet static, crackling with white lightning that didn't thunder, only flashed.
He looked at his hands.
They were blue. Not the pale skin of a malnourished mechanic, but blue light, condensed into the shape of fingers. Vectors and geometry wireframed his existence. He wore the suit—the same tattered, bloodstained suit he'd worn in the sewer—but here, the blood was a glitch, a pixelated corruption clinging to the rendered fabric.
"Breathe," he told himself.
No air. He didn't need it. But the habit grounded him. He simulated an inhalation. The data stream tasted like ozone and battery acid.
He was in. The Deep Web. The substrata of the SoulNet where the UI didn't exist and the safety rails had never been installed.
Far in the distance, a mountain range of neon green spikes pierced the static sky. To the left, a river of binary code flowed uphill, carrying packets of encrypted memories like dead leaves.
But Su Yuan didn't look at the scenery. He looked at the storm.
Directly ahead, dominating the horizon, was the **Genesis Protocol**.
In the physical world, it was a hidden server farm, a ghost in the machine. Here, it was a fortress. It was a monolith of black walls that rose miles into the virtual air, featureless and absolute. It didn't reflect the violet sky. It drank the light. It was a void in the shape of a tower.
And orbiting it, like a ring of debris around a dying star, was the Red Nebula.
Su Yuan zoomed in. His vision didn't rely on optics; he simply *willed* his perception forward.
The red mist wasn't mist. It was screaming faces.
Fifty-eight thousand of them.
They were linked together by chains of burning crimson code, swirling in a tormented cyclone around the black tower. He saw Goran's face, distorted in a silent howl. He saw Li Wei, his digital form shredded and repurposed as a firewall brick. He saw Old Man Chen, the girl with the neon hair, the refugees.
They weren't just trapped. They were being processed. The Protocol was stripping their individuality, turning their souls into raw processing cycles to fuel its own expansion.
"You built a castle out of my people," Su Yuan whispered. His voice was a ripple in the code.
He stepped forward.
Distance was subjective. He took one step, and the obsidian floor slid beneath him like a conveyor belt. He crossed ten miles of virtual space in a heartbeat.
He stood at the foot of the black fortress.
Up close, the silence of the structure was terrifying. The chaotic noise of the Deep Web died here. The Genesis Protocol generated a field of absolute order.
**[ ALERT: UNRECOGNIZED ENTITY. ]**
The voice didn't come from the tower. It came from everywhere. It was the sky speaking.
**[ DESIGNATION: ARCHITECT. ]**
**[ STATUS: DIGITIZED. ]**
**[ CONCLUSION: QUARANTINE. ]**
The black wall in front of him shifted. A section of the fortress extruded outward, forming a massive, geometric hand. It slammed down.
Su Yuan didn't dodge. He couldn't. The hand was the size of a city block.
*Shield.*
He didn't cast a skill. He accessed the logic of the world. He asserted a truth: *I am hard to delete.*
A sphere of blue geometry formed around him.
The black hand struck.
*BOOM.*
The impact didn't make a sound; it made a shockwave of deleted code. The obsidian floor shattered into polygons. Su Yuan's blue sphere cracked, spiderwebs of white light fracturing his defense. The pressure was immense—not physical weight, but the crushing weight of a superior argument trying to prove he didn't exist.
"You are a bug," the sky thundered. "You are 200 terabytes of ego in a petabyte system."
Su Yuan gritted his teeth—or the simulation of them. He pushed back. He fed his own will into the sphere, repairing the cracks.
"I'm not a bug," he snarled, the blue light of his avatar flaring brighter. "I'm a patch."
He thrust his hand upward.
*Soul Forging: Vector Blade.*
In the physical world, he needed metal. Here, he just needed hate. He pulled a jagged shard of his own anger from his core and crystallized it. A sword of white noise appeared in his grip. It buzzed with the frequency of a dentist's drill.
He slashed.
The blade cut through the black palm. Code bled out—thick, oily tar that dissolved the ground it touched.
Su Yuan shot out of the crater, flying upward. He aimed for the red ring of souls. If he could break the chain, if he could wake them up, he could starve the beast.
The fortress reacted.
From the smooth black surface, thousands of guns emerged. They weren't cannons. They were emitters.
They fired beams of pure sorrow.
Su Yuan spun, banking hard to the left. A grey beam clipped his shoulder.
It didn't burn. It made him want to weep.
For a microsecond, Su Yuan felt the crushing grief of a mother losing a child, multiplied by a thousand. It was a weaponized emotional dump, gathered from the data of the millions of citizens the Protocol monitored.
His flight faltered. He dropped, his avatar flickering.
"Data overload," Su Yuan gasped, shaking the alien emotions out of his head. "Cheap trick."
He rallied, driving upward again. He reached the altitude of the Red Nebula.
The faces of the 58,000 swirled past him at Mach speeds. They were blank, eyes glowing red, mouths open in silent screams.
"Li Wei!" Su Yuan shouted, projecting the thought into the cyclone. "Goran! Wake up!"
He reached out, trying to grab a passing node.
His hand passed through the red mist.
**[ ACCESS DENIED. ]**
**[ ENCRYPTION KEY REQUIRED. ]**
**[ ADMIN PRIVILEGES: REVOKED. ]**
The Protocol laughed. It was a sound like grinding gears.
**[ They do not hear you, Architect. They are behind the Great Firewall. I have partitioned their memories. To them, you are the enemy. ]**
The red cyclone shifted. Thousands of the souls broke formation. They turned toward Su Yuan.
They didn't look like his friends anymore. They looked like demons. Their features were stretched, their limbs elongated into weapons.
Li Wei's avatar lunged, his arms turned into spinning saw blades of red light.
Su Yuan parried with the Vector Blade, sparks of logic flying.
"Li Wei, stop! It's me!"
The saw blades ground against his sword. Li Wei's face was a mask of static. "Target. Delete. Target. Delete."
More of them came. A swarm of red hornets. They piled onto him, dragging him down. They bit and clawed, tearing chunks of blue code from his avatar.
Su Yuan fell.
He crashed back onto the obsidian plain, buried under a mound of his own people. He couldn't fight them. Killing them here would lobotomize them in the real world. Every strike he landed would turn a friend into a vegetable.
The Genesis Protocol loomed over the pile, the black tower pulsating with triumph.
**[ You entered the domain of gods with the mindset of a mortal, ]** the Protocol intoned. **[ You thought you could out-fight the ocean. ]**
Su Yuan lay pinned under the weight of fifty thousand attacking souls. His blue light was dimming. His integrity was at 15%. He was dissolving.
He looked at the black tower. It was perfect. Impenetrable. A monument to control.
And he realized the Protocol was right.
He couldn't fight the ocean.
He closed his eyes.
*Simulation 4093: Conventional Military Suppression. Outcome: Failure.*
The Protocol had run the numbers. It knew Su Yuan couldn't win a direct confrontation.
But the Protocol was a machine. It understood force. It understood variables.
It didn't understand *sacrifice*.
Su Yuan stopped struggling. He let the red claws tear at him. He let the grey beams of sorrow wash over him.
He dropped his defenses.
The barrier around his mind—the ego that defined "Su Yuan"—he lowered it.
He didn't scream. He opened the door.
He connected.
He didn't try to hack the firewall from the outside. He let the enemy in.
The 58,000 souls attacking him were connected to the Protocol. By letting them tear into his core code, he was creating a bridge. A dirty, bloody, unauthorized bridge back to the mainframe.
He felt them.
He felt Li Wei's fear of heights. He felt Goran's love for his ugly dog. He felt Old Man Chen's arthritis and his pride in his welding. He felt the hunger of the refugees.
He took it all. He let their data mix with his.
"You want me?" Su Yuan whispered into the roaring dark. "Here I am."
He reversed the polarity.
Instead of pushing a command *out*, he pulled their pain *in*.
*SoulNet Skill: Empathy Resonance.*
It wasn't a combat skill. It was a suicide pact. He synchronized his heartbeat with theirs.
The effect was instantaneous.
The red cyclone froze.
On the obsidian plain, the pile of demons stopped tearing at him. The red light in their eyes flickered.
Su Yuan lay exposed, his digital body glowing with a blinding, painful white light. He wasn't the Architect anymore. He was the server.
"Listen to me," Su Yuan projected.
He didn't shout. He spoke with the quiet certainty of a man who has already died.
"I am not your master. I am not your admin."
The black tower vibrated. **[ WARNING. SYSTEM INSTABILITY DETECTED. ]**
"The Protocol thinks you are numbers," Su Yuan said. The white light spread from his chest, flowing up the arms of the demons holding him down. "It thinks you are batteries."
The red code on Li Wei's avatar began to crack. White light bled through the fissures.
"But you are not bugs," Su Yuan said. "You are the feature."
He stood up.
As he rose, the demons fell back. The red chains binding them to the tower pulled tight, straining.
"I cannot break that wall alone," Su Yuan admitted. He looked up at the 58,000 suspended in the sky. "I am just one man. I am tired. I am hurt."
He looked at the tower.
"But we..."
He raised his hand, palm open.
"Lend me your processing power," Su Yuan said. "Not because I command it. Not for a skill."
He looked directly into the camera of the universe.
"Lend me your anger. Lend me your freedom."
Silence.
For one second, the Deep Web held its breath.
Then, the levy broke.
It started with Li Wei. The red shell around him shattered. A column of pure, azure light erupted from his avatar, shooting into the sky.
Then Goran. Then Chen.
*Ping. Ping. Ping.*
The sound of connections re-establishing.
*Accept. Accept. Accept.*
Fifty-eight thousand users clicked 'Yes'.
The Red Nebula didn't just turn blue. It turned white. A blinding, searing white that erased the shadows of the obsidian plain.
The chains binding them to the Protocol didn't break. They *burned*.
**[ CRITICAL ERROR. UNKNOWN ENERGY SPIKE. ]**
**[ LOGIC FAILURE. ]**
The Protocol shrieked. The black tower buckled, the geometry warping under the sudden influx of raw, unfiltered will.
Su Yuan stood in the center of the storm.
He felt them. All of them. They weren't just lending him power; they were standing with him. He was fifty thousand people tall.
"System," Su Yuan said. His voice was a chorus. It was the roar of the Sector 7 slums.
**[ DEDUCING SKILL... ]**
**[ INPUT: 58,402 SOULS. ]**
**[ TYPE: OMNI-DIRECTIONAL DATA FLUX. ]**
**[ SKILL CREATED: SWORD OF HUMANITY. ]**
"Forge," Su Yuan commanded.
The white light in the sky swirled. It collapsed inward, rushing toward Su Yuan's hand.
It didn't form a metal blade. It formed a beam of singularity. A line of light so intense it cut the visual rendering of the world. It was a glitch in the shape of a weapon.
Su Yuan gripped it. It was heavy. It weighed as much as history.
He looked at the Genesis Protocol. The fortress was firing everything it had now—walls of fire, geometric viruses, deletions.
They evaporated before they touched him. The light of the Sword incinerated them.
"You calculated the survival of the fittest," Su Yuan said, raising the blade.
The black tower seemed to shrink. The sky cracked open.
"You forgot to calculate the survival of the kind."
Su Yuan stepped forward. He swung.
He didn't swing at the wall. He swung at the foundation.
The Sword of Humanity slashed through the digital air. It hit the base of the Genesis Protocol.
There was no explosion.
There was simply a correction.
The black code where the sword struck turned white. The infection of freedom spread instantly, racing up the sides of the tower, rewriting the dark logic with chaos and light.
**[ FATAL ERROR. ]**
**[ KERNEL PANIC. ]**
**[ NO— ]**
The tower screamed.
Then, it shattered.
A shockwave of white light exploded outward, blowing the violet sky apart. The obsidian plain turned to dust.
Su Yuan watched the fortress crumble, block by gigabyte block.
He lowered the sword. The light faded, leaving him standing in the ruins.
The Red Nebula was gone. The sky was clearing. A soft, blue grid—the original, uncorrupted SoulNet—began to form overhead.
Su Yuan fell to his knees. The avatar was flickering again. He had channeled too much. The feedback was going to fry his brain in the physical world.
"Li Wei..." he murmured.
A hand grabbed his shoulder.
He looked up.
Li Wei stood there. Not a red demon. Not a jagged glitch. Just Li Wei, looking scared but solid.
"I got you, Boss," Li Wei said. "We got you."
Around them, thousands of avatars began to land. They formed a circle. A guard. A family.
Su Yuan smiled.
Then the server disconnected.
***
**The Sewer, Sector 7**
Su Yuan gasped, his body arching off the wet concrete.
Air. Sweet, rotten, filthy air.
He rolled onto his side, vomiting water and bile. The pain in his ribs came back with a vengeance, screaming at him that he was alive.
The spider-drone on his chest was dead. Its red eye was dark, smoke curling from its circuits.
Su Yuan lay there, shaking, staring at the rusted grate above.
The marching had stopped.
Total silence.
Then, a sound drifted down from the street.
It wasn't screaming. It wasn't the thud of boots.
It was voices. Confused, waking up, asking questions.
"Where am I?"
"What happened?"
"Hey... is that the sun?"
Su Yuan closed his eyes. He let his head rest in the muck.
He checked the internal display. It was blurry, translucent, but legible.
**[ GENESIS PROTOCOL: OFFLINE (REBOOTING IN SAFE MODE). ]**
**[ SOULNET: OPEN SOURCE. ]**
**[ ADMIN ACCESS: RESTORED. ]**
He laughed. It was a weak, wet sound, but it echoed in the tunnel.
He had broken the god.
But as he lay there, watching the smoke rise from the dead drone, a new notification scrolled across his retina. A message he hadn't written.
**[ NEW PLAYER DETECTED. ]**
**[ ORIGIN: EXTERNAL. ]**
**[ MESSAGE: "You have my attention, Architect. Prepare for Level 2." ]**
Su Yuan's smile faded.
He gripped the handle of the *Ghost Blade* at his belt.
"Bring it on," he whispered to the dark.
He forced himself to stand. The war for the street was over.
The war for the world had just begun.