System Rebirth: The Rise of Jace Ronan

Chapter 4: The Ghost Circuit

The rain hadn't stopped in three days. It beat against Blackrift's rotting skin like judgment. Steady, cold, and uncaring.

I walked through it like a shadow, head down, hands buried in the pockets of my torn jacket, my breath fogging in the night air.

The city's filth clung to everything. To the sidewalks slick with oil. To the gutters that choked on bones and rust. To the eyes of those who still wandered the streets long after decency slept. I didn't sleep. Not since Vico. His face haunted me. Not because I felt guilt. No. I didn't regret what I did to him. But what he said before he lost consciousness clung to me like a splinter under the skin.

‘You don't know what that thing in you really is.’

And worse... I didn't.

The train graveyard in Sector 10 was where I disappeared when I didn't want the city to find me. Rotting engines stretched into the dark like sleeping giants, their insides gutted, their metal bodies split open and devoured by moss, rain, and rust.

I sat on the side of a wrecked passenger car, hunched over with my elbows on my knees, watching water drip from broken windows onto old leather seats.

The scent of iron and mildew was thick here. No surveillance, no clan sensors. Just memory. I used to come here as a kid, back when I believed in things. Back when strength was something earned, not given. I heard the shift in air before she arrived.

Yui didn't make noise when she moved, but her presence always felt like a cold wind through a half-open door, quiet but impossible to ignore. She sat beside me without a word, knees pulled up, black boots slick with rain. Neither of us spoke for a while. The silence between us was growing more familiar than our conversations, like we were both too aware of the weight of everything unspoken. Finally, she broke it.

“Your face is still bruised.” She said.

I smirked. “You should see the other guy.”

She didn't laugh. Instead, she said, “you know what you did to him wasn't just a win. It was a message.”

“Yeah,” I muttered. “Didn't mean to send one.”

“You sent it anyway. Now the clans are listening.”

I leaned back against the cold steel and stared up at the sky. A single crack of red lightning arced overhead, brief and jagged.

Blackrift had no stars, just haze, storm clouds, and the distant flicker of dying satellites.

“He said something.” I said after a while, “right before I knocked him out, that the system was a mistake, that it was never meant to survive.”

She looked at me then. Really looked.

Her eyes were darker tonight. Not in color, but in weight. “I think it's time I told you something.”

I didn't respond, just waited.

“My brother,” she said. “He was bonded to a system. Years ago. We don't know how it happened, only that it wasn't planned. He was barely 16 when it activated. First few weeks, it looked promising. He started getting stronger. Smarter. Faster…” Her voice dipped.

“Then things changed. He started hearing things, speaking in riddles, talking about circuits and memories that weren't his. He said the system was waking up, learning him, rewriting him.”

I felt a cold thread unwind down my spine.

“Then one day, he vanished. Lab where he was being monitored exploded. Nothing left but smoke and encrypted data shards. But one phrase kept repeating in the fragments.” She reached into her coat and pulled out a chipped data wafer, handing it to me. Scratched into the side were two words.

GHOST CIRCUIT.

“That,” she said, “was what they called it. A prototype. A parasite. Something that bonded too deeply. Something that didn't just change its host. It became its host.”

I stared at the wafer, rain rolling down its surface like it was sweating.

“What does that mean for me?”

She leaned forward, elbows on knees. “It means you're not just some random stray with lucky timing. You're part of something that was never supposed to make it out of the labs.”

I let the silence stretch.

Yui had always kept her distance. Always played the role of the eyes behind the screen. But tonight, something about her was different. More open. More fragile.

“You think that's what I have?” I asked. “The same thing your brother bonded with?”

She nodded. “Or something worse.”

We left the graveyard sometime after midnight.

Yui led me through a network of alleyways until we reached a closed laundromat on the west end of the city. It looked abandoned from the outside, but she keyed in a sequence of knocks on the side entrance.

The door clicked open and stale heat poured out. Inside was a hidden forge buried beneath the city's bones.

A man named Grell ran the place. Old cultivator, half machine, all paranoia. He squinted at me through a film of steam and gunpowder.

“You're the system boy,” he grumbled. “Thought you'd be taller.”

“You want to insult me or help me?”

He snorted. “Can't I do both?”

He led me to a wall lined with weapons. Not modern ones. No guns. No plasma. These were old. Steel and bone, ruined edges and spirit thread hilts. Each one hummed faintly like they were asleep and dreaming. He picked one. A short blade, jagged down the spine, perfectly balanced.

“This one's a little mean,” he said. “Kind of like you, I guess.”

I took it. The moment my hand closed around the grip, I knew it was mine.

“It's not just metal,” he said. “That's spiritual steel laced with memory ink. It'll get stronger the more you use it, the more… you mean it.”

I nodded.

Sometimes a weapon doesn't just fit your hand. Sometimes it knows your hand.

Back on the rooftop above Grell's forge, I trained. Yui watched from a distance, her back against the wall. Arms crossed. She didn't speak, didn't interrupt, just studied me like she was trying to see through the way I moved. I cut the air with the blade. Again. And again. My muscles screamed, ribs still bruised from the fight with Vico.

But I kept going.

Pain had become something else now. Not an enemy. Not a teacher. A companion.

“I still don't get you,” Yui said finally.

“Get what?”

“You burn like someone chasing death, but you keep surviving.”

I stopped, breath ragged. “Maybe I'm just too stubborn to die.”

She shook her head. “No, it's more than that. You're changing.”

I sheathed the blade. “I have to.”

“No,” she said. “You're becoming something else. Something closer to what the system wants you to be. And I don't know if that's a good thing.”

I didn't answer her, because I didn't know either.

Later that night, we sat side-by-side on the edge of the rooftop. The city sprawled before us in broken colors. Neon signs flickering. Sirens in the distance. Shadows shifting under half-dead lights.

“I want to help you,” Yui said.

“You already are.”

“No,” she said. “Not just with intel or weapons. I mean help you. Get through this. Stay. You.”

I didn't look at her. Because the truth was, I wasn't sure who ‘me’ even was anymore.

And if this system kept changing me, if it kept digging deeper into my memories, my instincts, my mind, maybe the version of me she was trying to save was already gone.

So I said nothing.

And she didn't press. She just leaned back, looked up at the rain, and whispered, “Don't let it take you, Jace.”

I closed my eyes. And for the first time, I wasn't sure I could keep that promise.