Mike stared at the smoking, twitching body of Enforcer ID 419, lying in the center of the perfectly circular scorch mark on the linoleum floor of the Golden Lotus Eatery. The corporate suit’s tailored jacket was fused to the floor tiles.
"We need to move him," Sister Zhang said, her voice shaking as she picked up her dropped meat cleaver. She didn't look like she wanted to chop him; she looked like she wanted to use the flat of the blade to push him into the industrial grease trap. "If the Compliance Department’s automated sweepers ping his GPS and find him in my kitchen…"
"They won't," Mike interrupted, his voice tight.
He crouched next to the unconscious, banned Enforcer. The guy’s physical body was relatively intact—the System’s lightning was designed to obliterate spiritual code, not necessarily flesh—but his aura was completely dead. It was like looking at a bricked smartphone.
Mike reached out, his hand hovering over the man’s lapel. He didn't want to touch the guy. His thumb viciously dug into the bleeding callus on his index finger. Hostile interaction with a corporate representative, his brain screamed, the 5-Star PTSD flaring up again. This is how you get deactivated. This is how you end up living in a tent on Skid Row.
"Mike. The tracker," Zhang urged, stepping closer.
Mike gritted his teeth, grabbed the silver Heavenly Dao badge pinned to the ruined lapel, and yanked it free. The metal was blisteringly hot. He dropped it on the prep table and pulled out his cracked phone, keeping his thumb carefully away from the dead zone of shattered glass.
The Root terminal was still glowing. He typed a quick sequence.
> Identify_Hardware: [Silver_Badge_RFID] > Execute_Command: [Spoof_Location] > Set_Coordinates: [37.8270° N, 122.4230° W]
"There," Mike breathed, his chest heaving slightly. "I just bounced his telemetry ping to the middle of the San Francisco Bay, right next to Alcatraz. As far as the System knows, he was conducting a maritime audit and dropped his badge in the water."
"And the body?" Zhang pointed with the cleaver.
"We drag him out to the alley and prop him against the dumpsters behind the rival Szechuan place down the block," Mike said pragmatically. "He’s got zero Qi left. He looks exactly like every other burned-out, free-tier junkie who overdosed on cheap synthetic energy. When he wakes up, he won't have the premium subscription required to access his own memories of the last hour. The algorithm auto-wipes the cache of banned users to save server space."
It took them ten grueling minutes to haul the dead weight of the former Executive Cultivator out the back door, drag him through the freezing rain, and unceremoniously dump him behind a stack of rotting cardboard boxes two alleys over.
By the time Mike got back to the Golden Lotus kitchen, he was shivering, soaking wet, and his nerves were completely shot.
The DoorDash thermal bag was still sitting exactly where he had left it. It was no longer just humming; it was actively throbbing. The emerald-green light leaking from the nylon seams was so bright it cast harsh, neon shadows against the stainless steel appliances.
"Mike," Zhang said softly, wiping her hands on her apron. She stared at the bag with a mixture of profound hunger and primal terror. "You said that was a tip. I've been running this underground node for five years. I know what compressed energy looks like. That isn't a tip. That's a bomb."
Mike didn't answer immediately. He walked over to the bag. He could feel the sheer, oppressive gravity of the Premium Qi inside. It was forty-five thousand units of the purest, unadulterated spiritual capital the Heavenly Dao had to offer, stolen directly from the lungs of a Pacific Heights billionaire.
"It’s not a bomb, Zhang," Mike said quietly. He unzipped the bag.
Whoosh.
The release of pressure was physical. A shockwave of pure, glacial, emerald mist rolled out of the cheap thermal foil, instantly flooding the cramped kitchen.
Sister Zhang gasped, her knees buckling. She grabbed the edge of the sink to keep from falling. For years, she had survived by scraping the absolute bottom of the barrel—inhaling the toxic, ad-riddled spiritual exhaust that drifted down from the Financial District.
Now, she was breathing liquid gold.
The exhaustion etched into the deep lines of her face seemed to physically melt away. The chronic arthritis in her hands, a byproduct of chopping meat and circulating corrupted Qi, vanished in a heartbeat. The air in the kitchen suddenly smelled like high-altitude pine trees and pristine snow, completely masking the scent of stale fry oil and the ozone from the lightning strike.
"Heavens…" Zhang whispered, tears welling in her eyes. "It's… it's perfectly clean. There are no latency spikes. There are no pop-up ads whispering in the back of my skull."
"It’s Executive-class breakthrough fuel," Mike said, his voice flat, though his own dried-out meridians were greedily drinking in the ambient radiation. "Julian Vance paid twelve hundred dollars a minute for this stream. And we just hijacked it with a five-dollar pizza bag."
Before Zhang could process the sheer insanity of that statement, the heavy rattling of a failing combustion engine echoed in the alley outside. Brakes squealed, and a pair of headlights swept across the greasy window of the back door.
The door creaked open, and Lao Li stumbled in.
Lao Li was sixty-two years old, a first-generation immigrant, and a full-time Lyft driver who basically lived out of his 2012 Toyota Camry. He was wearing a faded beige windbreaker, a newsboy cap, and an expression of absolute misery. In his youth, back in the old country, he had been a practitioner of traditional, open-air Qigong. But the old ways were completely incompatible with the new, digitized, corporate Heavenly Dao.
"Zhang, you got any leftover pork buns? The surge pricing algorithm just shadow-banned me for declining a ride to Oakland, and my internal Qi circulation is completely—"
Lao Li stopped dead in his tracks.
He took one breath of the kitchen air. His eyes bugged out. His jaw dropped.
For a man used to drinking muddy puddle water, taking a sudden, forced sip from a firehose of premium champagne was a catastrophic shock to the system. Lao Li’s outdated, analog spiritual veins weren't designed to handle the sheer bandwidth of Executive-Tier Qi.
His face turned a violent shade of purple. He grabbed his chest, his breath hitching, and he suddenly doubled over, violently coughing up a splatter of dark, corrupted blood onto the linoleum.
"Lao Li!" Zhang screamed, rushing forward.
"Stay back!" Mike barked, his demeanor instantly shifting from panicked gig-worker to hyper-focused sysadmin.
Mike moved with terrifying speed. He grabbed a plastic bottle of cheap mineral water from a prep table and hurled it directly at Lao Li’s chest. The older man reflexively caught it, the impact staggering him backward.
"Drink it, you old fool!" Mike yelled, his tone vicious, dripping with his trademark, double-standard toxicity. "Your Qigong circulation path is built like Interstate 80 during morning rush hour! It’s completely bottlenecked! You’re trying to force a gigabit fiber-optic connection through a rusty copper wire! If you want to explode and paint Zhang’s kitchen walls with your internal organs, go outside and do it by the dumpsters! Don't ruin my favorite pickup spot!"
Lao Li, trembling violently, fumbled with the cap and practically deep-throated the water bottle, desperately trying to cool his overheating internal core.
While he yelled, Mike had seamlessly, almost invisibly, repositioned himself. He took a wide stance directly between the glowing DoorDash bag and Lao Li. The older man couldn't see it, but Mike was using his body as a physical dampener. The Root Admin 'Minor Repulsion Field' surrounding Mike’s windbreaker was acting like a firewall, absorbing the brunt of the emerald radiation and filtering it down to a manageable, slow-drip bandwidth before it could hit Lao Li’s fragile, analog meridians.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
It was Mike’s signature move: absolute verbal cruelty masking a desperate, protective instinct.
Lao Li collapsed into a plastic folding chair, gasping for air, his face slowly returning to a normal color. The corrupted blood he had coughed up was actually a good thing—the pure Qi had violently purged decades of industrial sludge from his system.
"You… you disrespectful little punk," Lao Li wheezed, glaring at Mike while clutching the water bottle like a lifeline. "I was circulating Qi before you were even born. My form is perfectly balanced."
"Your form is a localized denial-of-service attack on your own heart," Mike shot back, wiping his phone screen on his sleeve. He looked down at the terminal. The ambient pressure in the room was rising to dangerous levels.
The thermal bag was a temporary containment vessel. The forty-five thousand units of premium Qi were highly volatile. Without Julian Vance’s massive, expensive array to ground and process it, the energy was starting to destabilize. The emerald mist was thickening, crackling with static electricity.
"We have a problem," Mike said, his voice dropping the snark. "This data packet is too big. If I just leave the bag open, the ambient pressure is going to blow the windows out of this building, and the resulting spiritual vacuum will immediately alert the local Compliance grid."
"Can't you just absorb it?" Zhang asked, her eyes wide. "You’re the one who stole it."
"I have Root Access, Zhang, not a suicide wish," Mike snapped. "My personal hardware—my body—is still running on a free-tier physical build. If I try to download forty-five thousand premium units directly into my skull, my brain will melt out of my ears."
He looked around the cramped, greasy kitchen. He looked at Lao Li’s Camry parked in the alley. He looked at the massive, cast-iron industrial wok sitting on the cold stove.
A manic, deeply unstable engineering light clicked on behind Mike’s dark-circled eyes.
"I need to subnet mask the spiritual pressure," Mike muttered, pacing rapidly. "I need to distribute the load across a localized area network. A mesh network. If I break the data down into micro-packets and broadcast it over a wide frequency…"
Mike shoved a hand into his pocket, pulling out a crushed fortune cookie. He didn't even bother removing the paper slip this time. He just threw the entire handful of crumbs and paper into his mouth and chewed furiously. The dry, gritty texture helped ground his racing thoughts.
The algorithm can't calculate my fate, he thought, swallowing the unread prophecy.
"Lao Li," Mike pointed at the old man. "Your Camry. The suspension is shot, but you’ve got that weird, bootleg Feng Shui array painted on the undercarriage to save on gas mileage, right?"
Lao Li bristled, sitting up straighter. "It is not bootleg! It is a traditional Eight-Trigram gathering formation passed down from my master—"
"Great. It’s an antenna," Mike interrupted, already moving. He grabbed his e-bike, hauling the heavy, Frankenstein PV+ESS battery module off the frame. He dragged it into the kitchen, the thick copper cables trailing behind him.
"Zhang," Mike yelled over his shoulder. "Clear the stove! I need the big wok!"
For the next five minutes, the Golden Lotus back kitchen looked less like a restaurant and more like a cyberpunk chop-shop.
Mike placed the heavy battery module—which was already humming with the overflow Qi he had siphoned earlier—directly into the center of the massive cast-iron wok. The wok’s parabolic shape was perfect.
He took the USB-C cable, the one still leaking emerald light from the pizza bag, and began stripping the wires with a paring knife. He spliced the raw copper directly into the thick, greasy grounding wire of the restaurant's industrial ventilation hood.
"What are you doing?!" Zhang asked in sheer panic as sparks showered over her prep station.
"Building a router!" Mike shouted over the whine of the battery. "The ventilation hood connects to the roof exhaust. The roof exhaust connects to the structural rebar of the entire apartment complex above us! I’m going to use the building’s skeleton as a giant broadcast tower!"
He grabbed a spool of heavy-duty jumper cables from Lao Li’s trunk. He clamped one end to the PV+ESS battery in the wok, and ran the other end out the back door, clamping it directly onto the rusted exhaust pipe of Lao Li’s Camry.
"Hey! Watch the paint!" Lao Li yelled, though he was watching with a mixture of horror and profound fascination.
Mike ignored him. He picked up his cracked phone, the Yin-Yang flash drive glinting in the dim light. He knelt in front of the makeshift, utterly unhinged contraption. The pizza bag, the battery, the wok, the ventilation hood, and the Camry were all now physically linked.
But they needed the software handshake. They needed the Administrator’s blessing.
> Initialize_Local_Node > Designate_Hardware: [Wok_Antenna], [Camry_Grounding_Array], [Building_Rebar_Mesh] > Protocol: [Open_Source_Distribution] > Set_Bandwidth_Limit: 0.5% per user (Safe Mode)
Before Mike could hit execute, the alley door swung open again.
"Yo, Zhang! The algorithm is completely screwing me tonight!"
A young man burst into the kitchen, shaking rain out of his hair. He was nineteen, wearing a bright yellow courier jacket over a Berkeley University sweatshirt. He had a sociology textbook crammed into his delivery bag alongside a cold order of pad thai.
This was Xiao Ma. A freshman, a part-time courier, and a kid who spent way too much time reading Marxist theory on underground Cultivation forums.
Xiao Ma froze.
He looked at the glowing green DoorDash bag. He looked at the massive battery sitting in the cast-iron wok. He looked at the jumper cables leading out to the Camry. And finally, he looked at Mike, who was kneeling in the center of it all, bathed in neon-green terminal light, looking like a techno-shaman performing a digital seance.
"Whoa," Xiao Ma whispered, his eyes wide. The textbook slipped from his hand, hitting the floor with a thud. "I knew it. I freaking knew it."
"Knew what, kid?" Mike grunted, his thumb hovering over the execute command, trying to avoid the shattered glass zone.
"You’re a Vanguard," Xiao Ma breathed, stepping forward with absolute reverence. "You’re a hidden master. A class traitor from the upper tiers who has descended to the slums to dismantle the platform's exploitative apparatus. You're using dialectical materialism to redistribute the means of spiritual production!"
Mike stared at the kid. He slowly blinked, pulling his sleeve down to wipe a smudge off his screen.
"I am a twenty-eight-year-old college dropout with seventy grand in credit card debt, Xiao Ma," Mike said, his voice dripping with absolute, soul-crushing exhaustion. "I am not Karl Marx. I don't know what dialectical materialism is. I'm just a guy who knows how to reset a router. Now shut up and brace yourself. The Wi-Fi is about to go live."
Mike pressed the Cherry MX switch on his handlebar rig. Click.
[Executing Open-Source Broadcast Protocol.]
The explosion of energy was completely silent.
The glowing DoorDash bag instantly deflated, the blinding emerald light vanishing from the kitchen. The PV+ESS battery hummed a deep, resonant bass note that shook the floorboards. The cast-iron wok vibrated. Outside, Lao Li’s Camry shuddered as the bootleg array on its undercarriage flared with invisible power.
The forty-five thousand units of Premium Qi shot up the ventilation hood, racing through the structural rebar of the tenement building, and exploded outward into the San Francisco night.
But it wasn't a destructive blast. Mike’s code had dismantled the massive, lethal packet into millions of microscopic, harmless data streams. He was broadcasting on an open, unregistered frequency.
Free Wi-Fi.
Inside the kitchen, the oppressive pressure vanished. It was replaced by a gentle, continuous, perfectly optimized flow of high-grade spiritual energy. It felt like standing in a cool spring breeze.
Xiao Ma gasped, dropping to his knees. The chronic fatigue of working a fourteen-hour shift while studying for midterms evaporated from his bones.
Lao Li closed his eyes, his breathing finally stabilizing into a deep, rhythmic pattern. The old man’s analog meridians, previously clogged with garbage, were now singing.
Out in the alley, the change was instantaneous. A homeless man sleeping under a piece of cardboard suddenly stopped shivering, the ambient warmth of the Qi wrapping around him like a thermal blanket. Two exhausted gig workers leaning against a brick wall suddenly stood up straighter, the digital weight of their "low-tier" status lifting from their shoulders.
The entire three-block radius around the Golden Lotus Eatery had just become a sanctuary. An unregistered, un-throttled, ad-free oasis in a desert of corporate exploitation.
Mike stood up slowly, his joints popping. He looked at the cracked screen of his phone.
[Node Status: Active. Current Connected Users: 412. Network Stability: 99.8%.]
He had done it. He had successfully laundered the stolen VIP energy and given it back to the streets. He looked at Zhang, who was staring at her own hands in quiet awe, and at Xiao Ma, who was looking at Mike like he was the second coming of the Buddha.
Mike snorted, immediately throwing up his defensive walls.
"Don't look at me like that," Mike grumbled, walking over to his e-bike and grabbing his helmet. "I didn't do this out of the goodness of my heart. I just needed to dump the evidence before the Compliance Department audited my bag. And for the record, nobody tipped me for this delivery. Not a single cent."
He shoved another fortune cookie into his mouth, paper and all, chewing loudly to drown out the silence.
"You're a terrible liar, Mike Chen," Sister Zhang said softly, a genuine smile touching her lips for the first time in years.
"Yeah, yeah. Whatever. Keep the node running. Don't touch the wok." Mike strapped on his helmet. His 5-Star PTSD was already creeping back in, reminding him of the grim reality of his situation. "I gotta go. If I don't log at least four more hours on the app tonight, the algorithm is going to penalize my weekly average. And I still have bank collectors breathing down my neck."
Mike kicked the kickstand up and pushed the bike toward the alley.
He was the Administrator. He possessed the root access to the fabric of reality. He had just brought the fire of the gods down to the slums.
And he was still terrified of getting a bad review.
As Mike rode out into the rainy night, a small, blinking red icon appeared in the top right corner of his Root terminal, completely unnoticed.
[Warning: Massive Unregistered Bandwidth Spike Detected in Sector 7. Alerting Heavenly Dao Headquarters... Routing to Executive Assistant Qing.]
The honeymoon phase of Root Access was over. The System had finally found the glitch.
"I'm just a guy who knows how to reset a router." Sure, Mike. Sure.
This chapter had it all: a grumpy mentor, a starry-eyed idealist, and a hero who denies being one. Chat about the crew on
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Free WiFi for the people. 412 users and counting.
And the Open-Source Node is officially online! I love writing the dynamic between Mike, Lao Li, and Xiao Ma. You’ve got the cynical pragmatist, the stubborn traditionalist, and the starry-eyed idealist all crammed into a greasy kitchen. Mike claiming he isn't a hero while literally building a free-energy router out of a wok and a Toyota Camry is peak Mike behavior.
But every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The Heavenly Dao Headquarters isn't going to ignore a massive power drain in Pacific Heights and a sudden oasis in Chinatown. Next chapter, the real heavy hitters of the System start looking for our favorite delivery driver. Things are about to go from 'fun heist' to 'survival horror'.
Question for the readers: What do you think is written on those fortune cookie slips Mike keeps eating? Let me know your wild theories in the comments! If you’re loving the story, hitting that Favorite button and dropping a rating is the best way to support the Open-Source revolution.