+127 hours — Nanshan District, Pearl River Delta
From the top of a half-finished super-tall, Aiden watched dusk ignite into neon. Shenzhen's skyline looked less like a city than a motherboard—each tower a sparking transistor, every elevated highway a bundled cable. Somewhere below, three million commuters slipped toward sleep, and the Loom's global hum shifted pitch as if Shenzhen itself were a tuning fork.
The Dawn-Core at his chest beat irregularly, fatigued by Berlin's recent strain. When the pulse stumbled, it radiated a faint silver tint he'd never seen: burnout warning.
Maya climbed the scaffold ladder and crouched beside him. "Local sensor nets confirm a rogue coherence pocket. Starts around midnight, peaks by three a.m. No single conductor this time—more like… thousands on a shared patch."
Cassie called up from two levels down, lantern tucked under her arm. "Patch?"
"A mobile app," Maya answered, voice grim. "Beta-ware called Glass Dream. Promises perfect clarity and eight-hour REM in half an hour. Side-loads Loom frequencies straight into users' earphones."
Lin Xi stepped from shadow, Spiral Stone glinting green. "Artificial harmony again—but decentralised. Worse."
Nephis scanned rooftops, cloak fluttering like a low cloud. "Who sells it?"
"An outfit named EmergentSolutions, funded by half the valley's venture capital," Maya said. "Their servers sit across the bay in Qianhai Free Trade Zone. Air-gapped—no remote kill."
Aiden exhaled. "So we go analogue."
Seed of Imperfection
They spent the next four hours prepping a new dissonance seed: a braid of dawn-peach, iron-blue, and Lin Xi's chaos glyph bathed in gentle lantern noise. This time, however, the Dawn-Core quivered at every twist. Cassie touched Aiden's wrist. "Over-cycling can break it—and you."
"We can't let half a province vanish into a glass dream," he murmured, finishing the weave.
Maya hacked the city's smart-billboard mesh, loading placeholder code. Lin Xi synchronised breathing with distant thunder rolling in from the South China Sea; shaping the atmosphere offered a free reservoir of entropy. Nephis scouted EmergentSolutions' rooftop, tagging vents and cable trunks.
Infiltration at 23:27
A monsoon drizzle began, veiling the neon in gauzy sheets. The team slipped across catwalks into the tech campus. Card readers blinked green as if expecting them—Maya's handiwork. Inside, corridors smelled of ozone and floor wax. Screens displayed serene aquarelles labelled Focus Mode Activated.
They reached the main data vault: a glass cube atop a shallow reflecting pool. A single engineer in hooded hoodie dozed against a workstation, earbuds glowing faint blue—already inside Glass Dream.
Cassie knelt, hesitant. "Wake him?"
Lin Xi shook his head. "Break the loop first; his mind would tear if ripped too fast."
Aiden set the seed atop the cube. Dawn-Core flickered, reluctantly releasing its braid into the fibre conduits. Maya triggered the billboard payload; across Shenzhen, LED super-screens burst into nonsense poems, half-rendered memes, mock system errors. Distraction, confusion, life.
At first nothing inside the cube reacted. Then rows of server lights stuttered from cool white to chaotic rainbow. A sharp ozone crack split the air. Glass Dream's coherence pocket wavered.
Emergent Override
Ceiling panels snapped open. Drones—matte black, emblazoned with silver infinity symbols—descended, each projecting the Glass Dream sigil in strobing amber. They pulsed a counter-tone, trying to re-sync the system.
Nephis flung his cloak wide, absorbing the first wave of sonics. Maya jammed the drones' mesh, but they shifted to optical bursts. Cassie fired lantern arcs, blinding sensors. Lin Xi launched a Qi gust that flung two drones into the pool, sparking.
Aiden felt Dawn-Core spasm. The silver tint deepened. The seed had to finish propagating before the core overloaded.
He stepped onto the pool's narrow edge, hands braced on the cube. "Hold them!"
Dawn-Core Threshold
Inside Aiden's head, patterns blurred. Threads of Berlin, of Mars, even of the Knot swirled. Too many colours. One more surge could crack the gem; Lin Xi's warning rang clear: If the heart shatters, the Loom shatters with it.
He inhaled, remembering the farm night sky of his childhood, silent straw fields under real aurora. Imperfect, unpredictable—and loved. He let that memory flow through the Dawn-Core, not as energy but as story.
The crystal steadied. The braid pulsed once more, rippling out along city fibre loops. In high-rises and dormitories, sleepers twitched, rolled over, muttered at bizarre dreams of frogs singing opera—or jerked awake craving noodles.
The coherence pocket collapsed.
Glass Dream Fades
Lights inside the cube dimmed to standby. Drones lost power, clattering to the floor. The sleeping engineer stirred, removing earbuds with a puzzled frown.
Maya exhaled. "City metrics normalising. No runaway trances."
Cassie offered a shaky laugh. "Entropy wins."
Lin Xi leaned against a pillar, drained but upright. "Balance restored—for now."
Aiden slid down the glass to sit at water's edge. Dawn-Core glowed a healthy peach again, the silver cast gone.
But before relief could settle, alarms howled through the campus. Screens blinked to ominous black, then displayed a red sigil Aiden hadn't seen since the Starless Knot: an orange-limned Council rune, twisted into a new shape.
Maya's eyes widened. "Ghost code—but we wiped every seed."
Nephis whispered, "Someone rebuilt it inside Glass Dream—and used us to spread it wider."
That instant, city net traffic spiked. Billions of nonsense fragments— the very chaos they'd unleashed—rearranged into coherent packets, routing out of Shenzhen toward servers worldwide.
Aiden's blood chilled. Their antidote had become a vector.
He rose, shoulders heavy. "We just taught the world to improvise. So did the ghosts."
Thunder boomed overhead—real storm now, rain pounding the glass cube. The Guardians stared into neon reflections, knowing dawn would bring a new, more cunning melody waiting to be untangled.