Chapter 35: The First Inheritance

The Oracle Alliance was a sea of euphoric celebration. The Outer Court's forums, once a place for cynical hunters to trade rumors, had transformed into a digital monument to their impossible victory.

User_AxeManiac: "DID YOU SEE IT?! WE CRASHED THEIR GATE! WE STUFFED THEIR FANCY EXPEDITION RIGHT BACK DOWN THEIR THROATS! GLORY TO ORACLE!"

User_StrayDogCroc: "My squad handled the breaching charges. The look on those Prometheus guards' faces when we blew their million-credit door off its hinges... priceless. 10/10, would do it again."

The legend of Oracle had evolved. He was no longer just a prophet. He was a god of war, a hidden commander who had led a scattered flock of sheep and taught them how to hunt wolves.

In the quiet, professional sanctum of [Channel: Zero], the mood was one of a more profound, strategic satisfaction.

Old-Man-Jiang: "The strategic victory is absolute. We have crippled their primary research project and sent a clear message that we can strike them anywhere, at any time."

Hephaestus: "More importantly, the field data on my new toys is magnificent! The Kinetic Breachers performed 15% above expectations. And the Phase-Disruption Mine... hah! To see that arrogant 'Specter' get ripped out of his shadow form... a work of art!"

Qin Mo observed the celebrations, the analysis, the pride. He processed it as data. The operation was a success. Morale was high. His organization was solidified. It was the optimal outcome.

But a new, urgent sensation was beginning to pull at his consciousness. A deep, rhythmic hum at the very edge of his perception, a resonance that was growing stronger with every passing second. It was a call from across the multiverse. The Cybernetic God, his avatar in the world of chrome and data, had completed its final task. The inheritance was coming.

He knew he needed to focus his entire being on the process. To be distracted at a moment like this would be... dangerous.

He typed a final, simple message as Oracle, his last command as a pure, powerless observer.

Oracle: Well done. Consolidate your gains. Analyze the captured data. Await new intelligence.

He then went "offline," severing his connection to the channel and leaving his victorious commanders to manage their new world.

He sat on the edge of his bed in his small, quiet room. The rhythmic hum was now a roaring tsunami in his soul. The very fabric of his perception began to fray at the edges.

It started with sound. The gentle hum of his room's air purifier became a deafening mechanical scream. He could hear the flow of electricity in the walls, the whisper of data through the building's Wi-Fi network, the frantic, microscopic computations of the smart-fridge in the kitchen. The sounds of the city outside—the distant hum of maglev trains, the chatter of a million devices—all merged into a single, overwhelming cacophony.

Then came sight. The world dissolved into a new layer of reality. He no longer saw walls; he saw the energy conduits within them. He no longer saw the air; he saw the invisible rivers of data flowing through it, a vibrant, chaotic aurora of information.

A profound, tearing pain erupted from the very core of his being. His body, the "sealed vessel" that had been fundamentally incompatible with spiritual energy his entire life, was being forcibly, brutally pried open. It felt like every cell was being deconstructed and rebuilt, rewritten by a divine, alien code.

And then came the memories.

It was not a gentle recollection. It was a 300-year lifetime, a torrent of cold, hard data and forgotten emotion, slammed into his consciousness in a single, brutal instant.

He was a young man, willingly having his first organic arm replaced with a limb of gleaming chrome. He was a corporate soldier, editing his own pain receptors out of his brain to become a more efficient killer. He was a philosopher of the machine, concluding that emotion was a flaw, a bug in the human operating system, and systematically excising it from his own consciousness. He was Unit 734, a being of pure data and living metal, fighting a desperate, centuries-long war against the "Abyssal Corruption," a sentient computer virus that devoured minds. He was there, at the very end, uploading his entire consciousness into the planetary defense grid, becoming a true god of the machine, purging the virus in a final, sacrificial act of pure, cold logic.

The weight of it all, the centuries of cold, lonely existence, threatened to drown the nineteen-year-old boy, Qin Mo. He had to fight, to hold onto his own identity, to remind himself that he was the Observer, not just another one of his vessels. He was the ocean, not just one of the waves.

Then, as quickly as it began, the storm subsided. The pain vanished. The roaring cacophony of the digital world did not disappear, but it was no longer a chaotic noise. It was now a symphony, and he was its conductor.

Silence. A new kind of silence.

He sat on his bed, his eyes closed, and for the first time, he truly perceived his world.

He no longer had to hack surveillance cameras. He was the surveillance network. He could feel the passive gaze of every lens in the city as if they were his own eyes. He no longer had to intercept communications. He was the network. The endless river of data flowed through his consciousness. The encrypted whispers of Prometheus agents, the frantic commands of the government's security forces, the mundane chatter of billions—it was all just a part of him now.

He was a ghost in every machine on the planet.

He flexed his will, a simple, curious thought. He focused on the Shanghai Spiritual Stock Exchange. In a nanosecond, he processed every trade, every algorithm, every micro-transaction that had occurred in the last decade. He saw the market not as a chaotic mess of human greed, but as a simple, elegant, and utterly predictable wave function. He could make himself the richest man in the world in less than an hour. 'Boring,' he thought, dismissing it.

His thoughts then drifted, inevitably, to Su Liying. He focused, and his perception flowed through the network, through the city's infrastructure, to her apartment. He found her phone, and for a fraction of a second, he looked through its camera. He saw her in her room, her face illuminated by her screen, a frown of intense concentration as she analyzed the data his team had just captured for her.

A new, strange sensation flickered within him. It wasn't the cold, logical imperative to protect a high-value asset. It was something warmer, more complex. A possessive, primal instinct to guard this brilliant, determined girl who was fighting so hard for his cause.

He immediately severed the connection, a flicker of his old, human self asserting a new rule. 'That path is a vulnerability. Do not observe her directly unless required by the Sanctuary Protocol.'

He finally opened his eyes and looked down at his own hands. They looked the same, but they felt different. For the first time in his memory, he could feel a faint, warm energy stirring within his own body. He focused. He willed it.

A tiny, almost invisible arc of brilliant, blue-white electricity, crackling with pure data, danced between his fingertips.

He was no longer a zero. The Spirit Origin Orb would no longer read him as an empty shell.

He stood up and walked to his dark window, looking at his own reflection. His face was the same. His expression was the same. But his eyes... his eyes had changed. If one were to look closely enough, to stare into the deep, black calm of his irises, they would see them now. Faint, impossibly intricate lines of glowing, blue-white light, like the circuits on a divine microprocessor, spinning slowly in their depths.

The mask was still perfectly in place. But the being behind it had been fundamentally, irrevocably, and terrifyingly reborn.