Location: The Lemanissier Ranch, Outside Amarillo, Texas
Date: November 26, 2013; 06:00 Hours
The Texas dawn was harsh and cold. It burned away the night.
Alen stood in the paddock, his breath rising in the frigid air. He lifted a sixty-pound hay bale with one hand and tossed it into the feeder with a steady rhythm. To the world, he was Nicolas Lemanissier, a hardworking recluse trying to prevent his rundown property from falling apart.
But under the heavy flannel jacket, his body was a machine. The physical work felt less like a chore and more like practice. Every lift and every step was done with the focus Master Shi had taught him.
Lift. Twist. Release. Breathe.
By 09:00, Alen finished his chores. He washed his hands at the outdoor pump, the icy water shocking his system, before walking the mile to the neighboring farm.
Inside the dojo, the air smelled of cedar and hard work. Master Shi Yan Xing sat in the lotus position, eyes closed.
"You are late, Nicolas," Shi said without opening his eyes.
"The fence in the north pasture needed bracing," Alen replied, bowing slightly as he took off his boots.
"The fence is not what delayed you. Your mind is heavy. It drags your feet."
Alen stepped onto the mat. They began the forms of Xiao Hong Quan (Small Red Fist). Alen moved with tremendous power, his strikes cutting through the air. But today, he felt off. There was a brief hesitation between thought and action, a jagged edge in the smooth flow of the art.
Shi stopped suddenly, catching Alen's fist in his open palm. The sound of the impact was like a cracking whip, but the old man remained unfazed.
"You are here, and you are not here," Shi said, releasing Alen's hand and walking to the tea table. "Sit."
Alen sat, wiping sweat from his brow. "My focus is… divided."
Shi poured the tea. The steam rose in a perfect spiral. "The ghost is stubborn, isn't he?"
Alen looked up, his eyes sharp. "The ghost is dead, Master. I'm trying to clean up his mess. The cave, the facility—it's a wreck. Rotting wiring, corrupted data. It feels like trying to perform surgery on a corpse."
Shi took a sip of his tea. "Rebuilding the past is a tough job. But tell me, are you rebuilding it to bury it? Or to live in it?"
"I'm rebuilding it to use it," Alen said, his voice deeper. "There are things out there. Monsters. I need a sword to fight them."
"A sword is a tool," Shi agreed. "But remember, the strongest foundations are made not of stone and wire, but of a peaceful mind. If you build this fortress on anger, Nicolas, it will trap you. Do not let this project consume the person you are becoming."
Alen stared at the tea leaves swirling in his cup. "I'm just fixing what's broken, Master."
"And in doing so," Shi said, locking eyes with him, "make sure you are not broken in the process."
Location: The Hill Country Silo (The Hive)
Date: December 10, 2013; 02:00 Hours
The ranch was his refuge, but the silo was his obsession.
For weeks, Alen had been living a split life. By day, he was the rancher. By night, he drove the long, lonely roads to the hidden facility, going underground to become the Architect's Son.
The lab, for all its promise, felt like a tomb. The air scrubbers whined with age, and the scent of ozone and stagnant water filled the lower levels. Wesker had built this place to last, but decay was the one enemy even a god couldn't defeat.
Alen sat at the central terminal, surrounded by disassembled hardware. Circuit boards, stripped fiber-optic cables, and soldering irons cluttered the sleek desk.
"Hardware is easy," he muttered, rubbing grit from his eyes. "Funding is the issue."
He couldn't use his CIA slush funds for this. The volume of equipment he needed—server racks, cooling units, satellite transceivers—would alert every agency, from the NSA to the BSAA. He needed ghost money.
He pulled a small, hardened drive from his pocket. The drive he had recovered from Seien Island. Alex Wesker's legacy.
He plugged it in. The encryption was tough, a tangled mess of letters and numbers. But Alen knew the key. He typed in the date of the experiment that had connected them.
Access Granted.
The screen filled with account numbers. Shell companies in the Caymans, dormant trusts in Zurich, numbered accounts in Singapore. Alex had been practical. She had scattered a fortune like seeds in the wind.
"Time to harvest," Alen whispered.
He didn't transfer the money to a bank. That was the old way. The 2013 way was digital.
He began moving the funds—over twelve million dollars in total—through a maze of digital tumblers, washing the money through casinos in Macau and shell companies in Panama. Finally, it flowed into a series of anonymous digital wallets.
He converted it all into Bitcoin.
It was perfect. Decentralized, borderless, and in 2013, largely misunderstood by the authorities he was hiding from.
With a war chest that existed both nowhere and everywhere, Alen went to work.
Under the alias Paul Kay, packages began arriving at PO boxes across three counties. Military-grade processors from surplus auctions. Cooling coolant from industrial suppliers. He worked like a man on fire, tearing out the decaying elements of the facility and replacing them with new technology.
He slept on a cot in the server room, the hum of the cooling fans his lullaby. He ate MREs and drank stale coffee. He burned his fingers on soldering irons and cut his knuckles on server chassis.
He was rewriting the building's DNA.
Location: The Hill Country Silo
Date: December 21, 2013; 23:50 Hours (Winter Solstice)
The work was finished.
Alen stood before the Master Control Panel. The silence of the tomb was gone, replaced by the deep hum of power. The facility felt alive. It breathed through the new ventilation systems. It thought through the new server banks.
But the hardware was just the body. It needed a mind.
Wesker's original operating system was a customized nightmare—a Linux kernel fortified by paranoia. Alen had spent the last week rewriting the core code, patching the backdoored access Wesker had left for himself, and shutting out any outside entry.
He reached out and typed the final command sequence.
> INITIATE SYSTEM REBOOT
> LOAD: PROJECT_GHOST_WALK
The lights in the large room dimmed, then surged back to full brightness. The massive central screen, a wall of glass ten feet high, flickered.
Static. Then, a logo appeared. Not the Umbrella logo. Not Tricell.
Just a simple, blinking cursor.
SYSTEM ONLINE.
Rows of text began to scroll at blinding speed.
> SATELLITE UPLINK [KEYHOLE-12]: ACTIVE
> PROXY NETWORK: ROUTING
> BIOMETRIC SCANNERS: CALIBRATED
> HANGAR BAY 1: ONLINE
A heavy mechanical sound echoed from the hangar bay to his left. The spotlights turned on, revealing the sleek, predatory shape of the VTOL drone. It was a stealth craft, unmanned, able to fly sub-orbitally. Its navigation lights blinked green.
Alen turned back to the main screen. The world map appeared. It wasn't just a map; it was a nervous system. Red dots marked potential bio-hazard signals. Blue dots showed BSAA movements.
He had eyes on everyone: the BSAA, the DSO, Neo-Umbrella.
Alen leaned back in the command chair, the blue light of the map reflecting off his glasses. For a moment, he looked just like Albert Wesker—sharp jaw, cold intellect.
But then he smiled—a small, grim smile Wesker would never have worn.
"Okay, Father," he whispered to the ghosts in the machine. "You built this to rule the world."
He typed a command, locking the target parameters to a specific genetic marker: Natalia Korda.
"I'm going to use it to save it."
Mission Update:
Base Status: Fully Operational.
Resources: $8.4 Million (BTC Remaining), 1 Stealth VTOL.
Current Objective: Locate Natalia Korda.
Next Step: Infiltration of the Burton Residence.