Diverging Threads

It wasn't thunder that cracked the sky—it was mindfire. Arcs of resonance lightning forked from cloud to ley-line, writhing along the streets like electric serpents. Lanterns exploded in bursts of colorless light. Air shimmered with pressure as psychic stress rolled across the city in invisible waves.

Yun Ze moved through it like a man walking underwater. His cloak weighed heavier than usual, woven with memory-stabilization glyphs. Around him, civilians stumbled. Their thoughts turned slippery—saturated by the storm's feedback.

He kept his eyes low. He wasn't here to watch people break.

He was here to capitalize.

The memory market had already shut its stalls in anticipation. But Yun Ze didn't care about the market tonight. He moved with precision through side streets and blind alleys until he reached Warehouse Seventeen—one of the collector cult's secondary storage nodes. Unmarked. Quiet. Supposedly abandoned after a raid the previous year.

He knew better.

Beneath it lay a vault where unstable soul-chords were stored until purification. During a storm, even high-grade protections could fracture. Yun Ze planned to be there before they did.

The side hatch was unlocked—he'd made sure earlier through bribes and threats. He slipped inside.

The warehouse interior was dark, filled with sealed crates and the faint metallic scent of old blood and copper-rubbed glyphs. Stacks of resonance stabilizers lined the far wall, humming softly beneath layers of dust.

He moved quickly to the rear corridor. The glyph-rod at his belt pulsed in response to lingering memory fields—enough to confirm the cult had been here recently.

A concealed door waited at the end of the hall. He touched the panel and whispered the access sequence, stolen from a loop-logged cultist a week ago. The mechanism clicked.

He entered a chamber lit by pale green glowstones. Two cases waited on a long wooden table. One held a storm converter—standard design, four-lattice model. The other, more important, pulsed faintly with a sealed soul-chord inside: pure, high-tier resonance in raw form.

He pulled the converter out first and activated it. The lattice clicked together, releasing a soft hum that matched the storm's beat overhead. Runes flared faintly blue.

Then he reached for the soul-chord's case. It opened with a hiss of pressurized ether.

Inside floated a tethered filament—thread-thin, glowing soft amber, bound in concentric glyphs. Yun Ze lifted it carefully, fingers steady. The chord vibrated with potential, untouched by manipulation.

He whispered a binding phrase, securing the chord to his ledger via internal thread-feed. The interface in his vest accepted the profile. Data streamed into him in careful bursts: images, emotions, raw psychic matter.

A rare profile. Fear coupled with calculated sacrifice. Possibly a high-ranking collector's memory.

Even better.

Then—footsteps.

Soft, deliberate. Not guards. Someone trained.

Yun Ze didn't look up.

A voice followed: "You moved faster than we expected."

He turned slowly.

A man stepped from the shadows, dressed in black cult robes etched with silver. His face was clean-shaven, his expression neutral. But his eyes—dark and deeply focused—didn't belong to a trader or a priest. This one had seen combat. Command.

"You're late," Yun Ze said, calmly.

The man chuckled. "You're predictable."

"I'm efficient."

"You're a thief."

"No," Yun Ze said. "I'm a recycler."

Their eyes locked.

The collector's glyph-rod extended an inch. "Return the chord."

Yun Ze tilted his head. "You want to negotiate?"

The man considered. "I'd rather not kill you. That profile belonged to someone important."

"Not anymore."

The room held the silence of a lit fuse.

"I can offer you three profiles," the collector said. "Intact. Gold-tier. One grief, one enlightenment, one weapon-grade." A pause. "No strings."

Yun Ze's mouth twitched. "I don't trade power for sentiment."

"Then die with profit."

The man struck first, flicking the glyph-rod in a rapid cross—an arc of distorted resonance slicing through the air. Yun Ze ducked under it and slid toward the converter, slamming a lattice control. The hum flared, destabilizing the field around them.

The chamber shook as resonance collided with live emotion.

The collector stumbled—just a heartbeat. Yun Ze drove his shoulder forward, colliding into him hard. They both hit the wall.

The glyph-rod skittered across the floor.

Yun Ze brought his knife up.

But the collector was fast. His knee struck Yun Ze's side—throwing him off-balance. They rolled.

The soul-chord case slid across the floor.

Both men paused, eyes on it.

"Yours or mine?" the collector asked.

"Neither," Yun Ze replied.

He rolled aside, retrieved the glyph-rod, and activated the converter's overflow mode.

Warning runes lit up.

"What are you doing?" the collector demanded.

"Making the price too high."

The converter vibrated violently. Outside, the storm's peak struck—resonance lightning shattered a far wall. Wind and rain poured in, carrying psychic static. Sparks danced across the floor.

The chord pulsed louder.

The collector backed away. "That's unstable!"

"Exactly," Yun Ze said.

He reached the chord, shoved it back into the sealed case, and pocketed it in one motion.

"You're mad," the man whispered.

"No. I'm leveraged."

He activated a seal glyph on the converter—blinding light erupted, temporarily obscuring vision. Yun Ze dashed through the wreckage toward the exit corridor.

Behind him, the collector shouted something—but the converter overloaded.

With a crash, half the wall collapsed.

Yun Ze burst into the alley behind the warehouse, the storm still raging above. Water soaked his cloak instantly. His vision blurred—but he didn't slow.

Three turns. One dead-end. He ducked through a gutter entrance leading to a stonework underpass and emerged into an abandoned butcher's hall.

There, he stopped—breathing steady.

He pulled the soul-chord from his cloak and examined it. Still intact. Still pure.

Inside, a lifetime of stored intention. He could already sense the edges of a memory ritual—sacrifice, loyalty, the shattering of self.

He'd study it later.

Now—escape.

He slipped into the winding corridors of the city's fringe—toward his safehouse near the old tramyard. The storm behind him slowed. The mindfire lessened.

He reached the building and keyed the resonance lock.

Inside, quiet.

The room was sparse: one desk, a feeding matrix for ledger tokens, and a monitoring rune.

He laid the soul-chord on the buffered table and began threading it into the converter, this time under full control. Slowly, the memory began to spill outward—no damage, no contamination.

As it imprinted into his ledger, images bloomed:

A girl at a river. Her eyes closed. A knife in her hand. She spoke an oath. Her teacher wept.

Yun Ze frowned.

Not a weapon-grade memory.

A loyalty sacrament.

Dangerous in the wrong hands.

He tapped the imprint, encoded it as restricted-access, and banked it into deep storage. The value was too high for now. He'd sell it when the market peaked. Perhaps to the same cult he stole it from.

He checked the runes for trace marks.

None.

Then—he sensed the presence.

Behind him, a knock at the door. Gentle. Rhythmic. Like a lullaby.

He didn't move.

The knock repeated. Then a voice: "I come with terms."

Collector-cult again.

Yun Ze stood, adjusted his collar, and opened the door.

Same man. Clothes ragged now. Blood on his cheek. But alive.

He held no weapon.

"I could have followed with soldiers," he said.

"But you didn't."

"I brought terms instead."

Yun Ze stepped back, allowing him in.

They sat across the table. The chord still pulsed between them.

"What are your terms?" Yun Ze asked.

The man folded his hands. "Trade. You give us access to your loop-logged ledger. We let you keep the profile."

Yun Ze raised an eyebrow. "Loop data?"

"You've been bleeding it. Your ledger caught it—patterns we've never seen."

"And if I say no?"

"We'll make sure you're isolated. Our collectors operate in every city. No one will trade with you."

Yun Ze smiled. "That's cute."

The man didn't blink. "This isn't cute. This is math."

They sat in silence.

At last, Yun Ze pulled a token from his pocket—resonance-crystallized guilt. He handed it across.

"Proof of trust," he said.

The man pocketed it.

"We'll talk again," he said. "Next storm."

Then he left.

Yun Ze returned to the soul-chord. It still pulsed, softly.

He thought about storms, cults, and betrayal.

But mostly, he thought about data.

And how much people were willing to pay to forget the price they paid to win.