"You don't kill the cultivator. You kill their script."—Kairo Voidline, Bloodline Hacker Protocol: Entry 1.3
The three Sect Hunters advanced without ceremony.
Standard execution squad.
One wore Heavensteel armor embedded with a Severance Glyph, a script that disrupted enemy chi on contact. The second wielded a chain-blade bound to an ancestral blood pact, its edge dripping with corrosive qi. The third—clearly the captain—was marked with the Seal of Purity, carrying a divine decree encoded into his bones.
They weren't here to arrest me.They were here to delete me.
"By the edict of the Azure Flame Sect," the lead Hunter announced, "the bloodline anomaly is to be purged. The vessel beside it will be reclaimed and reprocessed."
Seris's fingers twitched. "Reprocessed?"
Her voice could've sliced titanium.
I pulled her back, my vision already overlaid with real-time data from my recompilation node.
[Target Scan Initiated...]
Captain: Zhen Ren - Pure-Blooded FlamewalkerThreat Level: HighStatus: Host to [Sunflare Gene Construct]Weak Point: Latent mutation in heart-node. Instability: 12%
I smiled. "That's the problem with divine cultivators."
I tapped my temple. The compiler flared.
"You all run legacy code."
They charged.
Zhen Ren vanished in a flash of golden flame—teleport glyphs igniting beneath his boots. The other two lunged, their qi signatures distorting space, trained to overpower with force and legacy power.
I didn't move.
Not physically.
[Initiating Override Protocol: Spectral Recompilation → Subroutine: Ghost Thread Injection]
My chi fractured into invisible strands of virulent code, wrapping around their meridian pathways before they even got close.
To them, it looked like I just stood still.
To me?
It was like writing malware into a living firewall.
"Sunflare Protocol Conflict Detected.""Injecting Rogue Mutation…"
Zhen Ren's chest flared—literally. A burst of internal fire ruptured from his ribs as the latent flaw in his heart-node turned against him.
He faltered mid-air.
I stepped past him and flicked my wrist.
His own flame—his legacy fire—burned back through his system like a chain reaction.
He fell, screaming.
The second Hunter struck next, the chain-blade screaming toward my head. Seris stepped between us, eyes glowing with arcanist fire.
"Activating Overlay: Arcanist-Ghost Vein."
She vanished.
Phased.
The blade passed through empty air—then backfired as a thousand phantom glyphs exploded across its surface, overloading the blood pact that bound it to its user.
The Hunter dropped, convulsing, as his own blood tried to unbind itself.
Only one remained.
The last Hunter—the one with the Severance Glyph—stood still, trembling.
I looked him dead in the eyes.
"You're wondering if you should run."
He nodded.
I nodded back.
"You should've run before you scanned me."
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the cracked data-slate I'd used to stabilize my recompilation.
It still held my original bloodline backup—the trash-tier Nullborn baseline I started with.
I crushed it.
"Null Template Deleted. Host Reclassification: Undefined Entity.""Bloodline: Unregistered. Unbound. Unleashed."
The compiler pulsed.
And I evolved.
Power surged.
Not as a cultivation breakthrough—not a level up.
This was mutation.
Code-level recursion.
The surrounding spiritual field bent as my recompilation node began stealing local data—absorbing residual qi, old spells embedded in stone, ghost echoes of cultivators long dead.
Seris turned to me, voice low and reverent.
"You're compiling reality."
"Not yet." I stepped forward. "But I'm writing the next version."
The final Hunter fled.
He didn't get far.
We stood among corpses.
The gate behind us hummed quietly, blood dripping from its cracked frame. Ghostfire energy danced along my fingers, laced with Seris's arcanist glyphs. We weren't just alive.
We were unauthorized code running in a sacred system.
"We can't stay here," Seris said finally. "The Azure Sect will send more. Stronger ones."
"Good."
She blinked.
"I want them to come," I muttered, my gaze distant, hands flexing with invisible scripts. "Because now I know how to eat their bloodlines."
She stared at me. "You really are broken."
"No." I turned to her, smiling faintly."I'm the patch they were too scared to write."
We escaped Sector Twelve through a fracture-line that led beneath the old war-forged cities—an ancient zone filled with broken scripts, unstable leyline storms, and tech-artifacts lost to time.
Most cultivators wouldn't survive five minutes there.
We'd make it our home.
New Location: The Null Grid (Safe Zone – Corrupted System)New Objective: Construct Base Node | Begin Rogue Bloodline Codex
Seris Loyalty: 62% (Intrigued + Linked)Compiler Status: STABLE (2 Nodes Active)Next Merge Candidate Identified: [ERROR—Redacted by Heavenly Firewall]