Falling into nothingness turned out to be remarkably noisy.
The unformatted noise of raw data roared like a cracked furnace flute. Huan Jue snorted, planted his heel on emptiness, and sank his center of gravity down toward his lower dantian. He inhaled through his nose, drawing in the wild torrents of unallocated logic, filtering out the chaotic static until his inner pool turned to glass.
*Still-Water Neigong: Calming the Torrents.*
He stomped downward. A ripple of milky, opalescent force rolled out under his cloth slippers. The churning black fog froze on contact, turning into pale slate beneath his tread.
Orynix flailed backward, windmilling arms thick enough to crack tree trunks, until his boots slammed onto the hard surface. "You—by the ancestral forge, you built a floor! Out of trash data!"
"It is dirt, boy. Everything is dirt until someone shapes it into a teacup or a grave," Huan Jue grumbled, dusting phantom lint from his synthetic tunic. His knee popped with an audible snap. "Hurry up. My lower back feels like someone replaced my spine with rusty pig iron, and my physical vessel is currently slumped over an unwashed mop bucket. If I get bedsores because of this idiot grid, I am setting fire to your toy arena."
Orynix bounded after him, cheeks blazing a bright, sheepish copper. "I can carry you! My frame is rated for industrial lifting—"
"Touch me and I will realign your meridians until you can only walk backwards," Huan Jue warned, marching ahead.
The pale walkway stretched across the void, knifing upward through broken sky-matrices until it punctured the gleaming white sub-basement of the Aegis Pavilion. They stepped through the rift into an octagonal sanctum bathed in sterilizing cyan light. Giant towers of crystallized processors rose toward a vaulted ceiling, humming with planetary bandwidth.
At the central pillar stood Tavros.
The technician’s yellow overalls were unzipped to his ribs, exposing an illegal cybernetic rig grafted straight to his collarbones. Cables ran from his temples directly into the pavilion's root console. His fingers flew across three overlapping bands of floating amber runes.
"Overriding bio-limiter protocol six," Tavros muttered to himself, giggling with manic triumph. "Rerouting thirty thousand volts back through the custodial bay jack... bye-bye, fake prince. Sleep tight, little imposter—"
"Tavros?"
Orynix’s voice broke the air like a snapped bowstring.
The technician froze. He spun around, the cheerful, dopey grin slipping off his face in an instant, replaced by a pale, ugly sneer. "Orynix? How are you even rendered? You fell through the floor! You should be scrambled bits in the waste bin!"
"You're killing him," Orynix whispered. His broad shoulders slumped, a terrible, hollow hurt carving grooves into his handsome features. He took an unsteady step forward. "You patched my rig before the grand finals last season. You brought me nutrient broth when my heat sinks cracked. We drank synthetic brew on the lower terraces! You work for them? All this time?"
"Oh, spare me the tearful holovid speech, hero!" Tavros spat, frantically typing with one hand while the other drew a plasma spike from his hip. "Do you know what the cartel pays for a stolen Imperial blood-key? I can buy three orbital suites and never clean your grease-stained joints again! He’s just an old squatter in a dead thief’s flesh. Step back, Orynix, or I’ll fry your neural link too!"
Huan Jue stepped forward and smacked the back of Orynix’s thick arm with a resounding thwack.
"Ow!"
"Stop gaping like a hooked carp," Huan Jue chided. "Youth always thinks every smiling clerk is a sworn brother. Watch closely, muscle-brain. Modern locks are just arrogant knots."
"Stay back!" Tavros shrieked, slamming his palm onto a crimson panel. "Active firewall engage: Nine-fold Obsidian Bastion! You can't pierce sixty-four layers of quantum encryption without an authorized cipher!"
A monolithic, glassy wall dropped between them, gleaming with millions of rolling equations. Red warnings screamed in the air. Tavros laughed, his fingers flying to finalize the lethal surge aimed straight at Huan Jue's resting body in the museum.
"Encryption? Cute," Huan Jue said.
He stepped to the glowing barrier. To any other man, it was an impenetrable curtain of high-tier mathematics. To an ancient grandmaster who spent three hundred years feeling the flow of heaven’s breath through mountain ridges and sick emperors, it was merely an unwashed body suffering from an acute blockage of bile.
"The core processor breathes here," Huan Jue murmured, tapping his index finger on a cluster of drifting amber numerals. *Tianzhu point.* "The input channel knots right in the shoulder... *Jianjing*."
He extended two fingers, coating the tips in a whisper of pure, compressed qi, needle-thin and piercingly sharp.
*Thwip.*
He stabbed the security lattice's glowing node. The numbers stuttered, flashing violet.
"What did you do?" Tavros stammered, his console suddenly spewing error prompts. "That’s an inert checksum register!"
"Inert? It’s an artery, you blind whelp." Huan Jue pivoted smoothly on his right heel, his second strike landing directly into the barrier's root flow. *Quchi point.* Then a third, snapping like a bullwhip into the bottom quadrant. *Zusanli.*
*Crack!*
The immense Obsidian Bastion didn't shatter—it seized. The millions of floating runes stiffened, spun in reverse, and flushed an unhealthy, jaundiced yellow. A high-pitched, agonized feedback whine shrieked through the chamber.
Tavros screamed, tearing the neural cables from his temples as blood welled from his ear canals. He fell to his knees, clutching his skull. The interface slammed shut in front of him, locked into a permanent administrative stasis.
[CRITICAL NERVE OVERLOAD: SYSTEM ENTERED PARALYSIS CYCLE]
"A simple knot on the gallbladder channel," Huan Jue remarked, shaking out his wrist. "Next time you build a wall, remember that anything designed to breathe can be choked. Now, clear out before I decide to acupuncture your actual liver."
Orynix stared at the dead console, then at Huan Jue. The champion’s face shone with adoration so fierce and unmasked it made the elder take half a step backward. "You treated a defensive array like it had a summer cold. You are... magnificent."
"I am tired," Huan Jue snapped, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "And my kettle is probably boiling over in the real world. Let us find the logout portal and—"
The entire administrative layer groaned.
The floor tilted thirty degrees. Support pillars sheared in half with a deafening screech of rending metal. The cyan light strobed into violent, suffocating crimson.
Above them, the ceiling of the sanctum didn't open; it was annihilated. A titanic bulk, cloaked in black composite armor and bristling with heavy rail-turrets, tore through the digital sky. A Dreadnought-class war construct, illegally brute-forced directly into the pavilion's sacred core, landed with the impact of a falling moon.
The shockwave blew Tavros across the tiles like a ragdoll.
A synthesized, booming roar rattled the marrow of their avatars, shaking the entire network:
*"RETURN THE PRINCE'S VAULT, JANITOR."*