The Last Mortal

CHAPTER 4: THE SECRETS IN THE SILK

 

"They're going to flag this entire sector within twenty minutes," Mira said, her breath coming in short, ragged gasps as she scrambled up from the basement hatch. She didn't look at Master Boros, who was still groveling on the white carpet, desperately scraping at his own skin to feel a spark of his lost power. Her mechanical eye was locked onto my hands. "You took a Bronze-rank lineage. Ren, your internal metrics should be tearing your nervous system apart right now."

"I don't have a nervous system that the system understands," I said, looking down at my palms.

Deep within my mind, the stolen water-weaving variables were already floating alongside the iron-stone code, completely stripped of their noble ownership markers. My chest felt tight, like a boiler holding too much steam, but there was no pain. My mortal body simply expanded to accommodate the data. The emptiness within me swallowed the foreign code, stripping it of its ancestral corruption until it was nothing more than raw, clean energy waiting for a direction.

"We need to move," I said, walking over to the workbench where she had dropped the customized gear. "Is the coat ready?"

Mira nodded quickly, her hands shaking as she picked up the long, charcoal-colored duster coat. The fabric was heavy, woven from dark null-threaded silk and lined with a flexible carbon-mesh designed to ground localized energy sweeps. "The coat will mask your physical heat and absorb minor biometric scans, but it won't stop a dedicated high-tier tracking array if you start throwing that stolen essence around. You need to keep your core suppressed."

I took the coat from her hands, slipping my arms into the sleeves. The fabric was cold against my skin, instantly dulling the ambient hum of the city's golden grid. It felt like stepping into a soundproof room. The heavy silk pulled at the stray particles of gold essence in the air, neutralising them before they could touch my bare flesh. I buckled the reinforced straps across my chest, then picked up the faceless ballistic visor resting on the table. The visor was a seamless sheet of polished black composite, completely smooth on the outside, though the interior HUD provided a clear, digital view of the surrounding room.

I snapped the visor over my face. The seals hissed as they locked into the collar of the coat.

[System Initialization: Null Mask Active.]

[Biometric Signature: Undetected.]

[Stored Repositories: Stone-Shaper (Iron), Water-Weaver (Bronze).]

"Let's test the stabilization loop," I said, my voice sounding slightly deep and modulated through the visor's internal filter.

"Not in here," Mira warned, backing toward the rear exit with her data cores clutched against her chest harness. "If you trigger a high-density discharge inside the shop's perimeter, the local grid will register a localized pressure vacuum. The Ministry monitors every square inch of commercial airspace."

"I'm not discharging it," I said, raising my right hand. "I'm compiling."

I focused on the cold knot of stolen energy in my stomach. Instead of running the Stone-Shaper script and the Water-Weaver script separately, I forced the variables to collide within my empty directory. I stripped the mass from the stone code and the fluid weight from the water code, leaving nothing but pure, raw pressure.

Mira watched in absolute silence, her cybernetic eye whirled into a tight, frantic focus.

A tiny, marble-sized sphere of distorted air began to hover directly above my open palm. It wasn't brown like the guard's stone, nor was it blue like Boros's water. It was a completely unranked, light-absorbing vortex of pure gray pressure that caused the dust motes in the air to violently pull toward my hand. The wooden floorboards beneath my boots groaned, fine cracks spreading through the polish as the room's gravity tilted slightly toward my fingers.

"Ren, stop," Mira hissed, her voice cracking as the glass bottles on her shelves began to rattle. "Your vitals are dropping. The scanner on my harness says your heart just stopped beating."

She was right. The moment I compiled the unranked code, my internal directory prioritized data processing over biological maintenance. My pulse vanished. My lungs stopped expanding. For five terrifying seconds, I was a walking corpse maintaining a gravity anomaly.

With a sharp flick of my wrist, I closed my fist, snapping the gray sphere out of existence. My heart immediately slammed against my ribs, restarting with a violent surge of blood that made my vision blur behind the black visor. I took a deep, ragged breath, steadying my feet against the cracked floor.

"It works," I said, checking the internal HUD. The unranked pressure technique was now permanently stabilized in my directory. "But it requires high-density fuel to scale. A few minor guards and a sector collector aren't enough to let me face the Grand Patriarch."

"Then it's a good thing we're breaking into the palace archives tonight," Mira said, reaching for the rear door handle. "If we can find the registry files for the central harvest spire, we can find your sister. And every high-grade bloodline crystal the Ministry has seized this century is stored in that same vault."

Before she could turn the lock, a deep, mechanical roar vibrated through the roof of the boutique. High-altitude tracking arrays over the commercial district began to sweep the alleyways, casting broad, flickering grids of red light through the shop's glass windows. The Ministry had detected the localized pressure drop.

"Out the back," I said, pushing her toward the dark alleyway. "Keep your visor down."