[HOST INTEGRITY: 5%]
[LOCATION: NETHER-CORE HQ - SECTOR 9 BRANCH]
[TIME: 8:00 AM]
The loading dock smelled like a funeral parlor.
It was the scent of "Blue-Rose" incense—Nether-Core's premium line. Thousands of crates of it.
But they weren't moving out.
They were coming back.
Trucks jammed bumper-to-bumper in the receiving bay, reverse alarms beeping in a discordant headache of noise. A driver leaned on his horn. Another one flipped off the Logistics Manager.
"Stop! STOP!" the Manager screamed into his comms, waving a clipboard at a reversing delivery van. "We have no fucking capacity! Turn around!"
"Turn around where?" the driver yelled back, hanging out the window. Sweat stained his shirt. "The warehouse is full! The dealers won't take it! They threw it back at us like garbage!"
A forklift whined, straining to lift a double-stack of returned crates.
The pallet groaned.
SNAP.
The wood gave way.
Two hundred boxes of premium incense crashed onto the concrete. The smell of crushed lavender and spirit-herbs exploded into the air, thick enough to choke on. Purple dust billowed up.
Nobody rushed to clean it up.
The workers just stared at the pile of broken product, hands in pockets.
It was trash.
Expensive, high-grade trash.
One worker kicked a box. "Forty coins a crate," he muttered. "Now it's fucking mulch."
---
[LOCATION: EXECUTIVE BOARDROOM - 50TH FLOOR]
[TIME: 8:15 AM]
The air conditioning was set to sixteen degrees. Freezing.
But the CFO was sweating through his silk shirt anyway. Dark patches under his arms.
Twelve executives sat around the obsidian table. Nobody spoke.
All eyes were on the Head Alchemist.
He wore pristine white robes, but his hands shook as he held a pair of tweezers. Clamped in the tweezers: a single stick of Grey Line.
He stared at it like it was a dead rat.
"Analysis?" Branch Manager Zhou asked. His voice was too quiet. Dangerous quiet.
The Alchemist dropped the stick onto a metal tray.
*Clink.*
"It's not alchemy," the Alchemist whispered. He looked pale. Sick. "It's... it's digestion. Or—fuck, I don't even know what to call it."
"Speak. Clearly." Zhou's fingers drummed the table.
"There's no refinement process," the Alchemist said, words tumbling out. "No herbal blending. No prayer infusion. No spiritual anchoring. This thing—" He gestured at the grey stick like it offended him personally. "—it's made of slag. Floor sweepings. Industrial runoff. It's *filth*."
"He's feeding them trash?" the Sales Director gasped, leaning forward. "We can use that! We can sue him for poisoning consumers—"
"No." The Alchemist cut him off. "You don't understand."
He fumbled with the holographic projector. His hands were shaking so bad it took three tries to pull up the molecular scan.
The image appeared: a straight grey line. Terrifyingly simple.
"It's pure."
The Alchemist swallowed hard.
"It bypasses cultivation entirely. Goes straight to—to Metabolic Conversion. Hits the spiritual stomach like a sledgehammer. It's 100% efficiency because there's zero biological variance. No herbs means no impurities. No impurities means—"
He looked up, eyes wide.
"He isn't refining herbs. He's refining *Waste*."
Silence.
Someone's pen dropped. The sound echoed.
The CFO stood up. He fumbled with the remote, nearly dropped it.
"The... the financials."
A graph projected onto the wall.
A steep, jagged red line plunging toward zero like a knife wound.
"Market Share in District C dropped 65% in twelve hours," the CFO stammered. His voice cracked. "District D is following the same pattern. We're seeing contagion spread to the Upper Slums now. It's—it's accelerating."
He clicked to the next slide with a shaking hand.
[SLUM CONSUMER DEPENDENCE INDEX]
[NETHER-CORE: 12% (FALLING)]
[GREY LINE: 88% (RISING)]
"We're bleeding out," the CFO said. "At this price point—0.5 coins per stick—we lose money on every single transaction. Our raw materials alone cost four coins. We can't compete. We can't even break even."
He wiped his upper lip. His hand came away wet.
"He has infinite ammunition. Because his ammunition is *garbage*."
"Drop the price to zero!" the Strategy Director shouted, slamming the table. "Give it away! Flood the market!"
"We CAN'T!" the CFO screamed back, voice breaking. "We have shareholders! We have quarterly targets! If we give it away for free, the stock price collapses and Head Office in the Capital fires every single one of us!"
"Then kill the dealers! Threaten them!"
"We tried! They won't even meet with us anymore!"
"Enough."
Branch Manager Zhou spoke.
He didn't shout. Didn't stand up.
Just stared at the red line on the screen.
The room went silent.
"You think this is a price war," Zhou said softly. "You think he wants market share."
Zhou shook his head slowly.
"This isn't competition. This is *Displacement*."
He let the word hang in the air.
"He's not trying to beat us. He's trying to make us irrelevant."
[LOCATION: DISTRICT 8 - STREET CORNER]
[TIME: 8:30 AM]
A Nether-Core street dealer leaned against his kiosk.
It was a nice kiosk. Polished glass. LED signs that cycled through product ads.
It was empty.
Ten feet away, a line of ghosts wrapped around the block. Fifty, maybe sixty of them. They were waiting for a kid—couldn't be older than fifteen—with a cardboard box full of grey sticks.
The dealer watched them. Watched the kid hand out sticks, collect coins, move down the line with mechanical efficiency.
The dealer looked at his own inventory. Beautiful blue boxes with gold foil. Premium packaging.
He picked one up. Opened it. Lit a stick of Blue-Rose.
He inhaled.
It tasted like flowers. Sweet. Expensive.
It tasted like a lie.
He looked at the ghosts in the line. They looked... solid. Stable. Their edges weren't flickering.
He looked at his own hand.
It was flickering slightly at the edges. Translucent. He was hungry too.
The dealer stared at the Blue-Rose stick in his hand. Forty coins retail. He got a 30% cut.
He dropped it into the gutter.
Stepped on it.
Walked over to the kid with the cardboard box.
"Give me ten," the dealer said quietly.
The kid didn't even look surprised. Just handed them over.
"Five coins."
The dealer paid.
[LOCATION: BOARDROOM]
[TIME: 8:45 AM]
"Fear," Zhou said.
He stood up, walked to the window. The city sprawled below—grey, sick, rotting at the edges.
"If we can't win on price, and we can't win on quality..." Zhou turned to face the room. "...we win on Terror."
He pointed at the PR Director.
"Launch the smear campaign. Now."
"Sir?"
"I want rumors," Zhou ordered, voice cold and flat. "Tell them the Grey Line causes Soul-Rot. Tell them it eats memories. Tell them users are fading faster."
He pointed a finger at the table like a weapon.
"Bribe the clinic doctors. Every sick ghost that walks in? Diagnose them with 'Grey Poisoning.' I don't give a shit what they actually have. Cough? Grey Poisoning. Headache? Grey Poisoning. Stubbed toe? Fucking Grey Poisoning."
"Post anonymous warnings on the Spirit-Net. Flood the message boards. Use the bots. I want panic."
Zhou's eyes were hard.
"Make them afraid to touch it."
"What about supply?" the Operations Director asked nervously. "He's still producing. As long as that factory runs—"
Zhou smiled.
It wasn't a nice smile.
"Not for long."
He picked up the phone.
"Get me the Smithing Guild Overseer.
The call connected. Speaker mode.
The Overseer's voice boomed through the room, jovial and fat.
"Manager Zhou! To what do I owe the pleasure?"
"Cut the lease," Zhou said flatly.
"...Excuse me?"
"The Lu Clan engineers," Zhou said, enunciating each word. "You leased them to Ren Wu. Recall them. Immediately."
"I can't do that," the Overseer laughed nervously. "We signed a contract. 72-hour lease. He paid a premium. Guild honor and all that—"
"I don't care about your contract," Zhou lied smoothly. "Nether-Core buys forty percent of your Guild's heating coils. Forty percent. Do you want to lose that account?"
Silence on the line.
Heavy, expensive silence.
"That... would be unfortunate," the Overseer muttered.
"Recall the engineers," Zhou said, voice dropping to a threat. "Tell them it's a guild emergency. Tell them there's a fire. Tell them whatever the fuck you want. Just get them out of that factory."
"The Lu Clan engineers are under active lease to Ren Wu..." the Overseer hesitated. "If I break contract, he can sue—"
"Not anymore," Zhou snapped. "Pull them. Or we pull our funding. Your choice."
More silence.
Then: "...Fine. I'll send the recall order."
*Click.*
The meeting adjourned.
Executives scrambled out of the room, shouting into their phones, desperate to save their bonuses, their jobs, their stock options.
Director Liu stayed behind.
He was the Vice Director of Personnel. Forty years old. Mortgage. Two kids in private cultivation schools that cost more than his salary.
He stared at the red graph still projected on the wall.
Looked at Zhou, who stood at the window like a captain watching the water rise over the deck.
Liu felt sick.
Nether-Core was going to lose. He could feel it in his bones. The smell of rotting flowers from the loading dock was an omen.
He walked to the bathroom on unsteady legs.
Locked the stall door.
His hands were shaking so bad he almost dropped his phone. Had to catch it against his chest.
He opened a secure messaging app—one of the encrypted ones the company didn't monitor.
He typed a number he'd found on the public filing for the "Ministry Union."
**TO: REN WU**
**FROM: ANONYMOUS**
**SUBJECT: INTEL**
He hesitated. His thumb hovered over the send button.
If he did this, it was treason. Corporate espionage. If they found out, he'd be blacklisted. His kids would lose their school slots.
But if he didn't... and the ship went down...
He thought about the Grey Line. Efficient. Cold.
He pressed send.
**[MESSAGE: They are coming for the engineers. Recall order issued. You have 1 hour. Maybe less.]**
His phone buzzed immediately.
**[RECEIVED]**
Liu deleted the conversation. Flushed the toilet for cover noise. Washed his hands twice.
When he looked in the mirror, his reflection was flickering at the edges.
Zhou didn't know about the text.
He was alone in the boardroom now.
Staring at the holographic map of Sector 9.
District C was greyed out completely. District D was flickering like a dying light.
He replayed the Alchemist's words in his head.
*Metabolic Conversion.*
He thought about the lease. Heating coils. Ventilation systems.
Zhou froze.
A cold realization washed over him like ice water.
"He's not selling incense," Zhou whispered to the empty room.
He traced the supply lines on the map with one finger.
Ren Wu didn't build a factory to make product.
He built a *machine* that eats waste and spits out energy.
"He's replacing us," Zhou murmured. "He's not building a business. He's building a fucking *utility grid*."
His hand trembled slightly.
He keyed his mic.
"Security."
"Sir?"
Zhou stared at the grey map. At the spreading infection of grey districts.
"Find out what he plans to build next."