Prologue: Tears That Do Not Exist
The rain in Lower Nine City was always acid. It struck the stacked steel flyovers, refuse mountains, and tangled neon conduits, beating out the stink of rotting rust. Seen from Upper City far above, the city resembled an old machine coughing blood; with every labored breath, violet-blue poison vapor burst from its exhaust valves.
"There are only rules here."
A-0 turned up the collar of his coat, hiding half his face in shadow. He believed in neither gods nor people. In this city, the only law of physics was the code written on cards.
At an intersection in District Nine, floodwater covered the ankles. A woman knelt in the filth, sobbing as if her heart were being torn apart, clutching a black plastic bundle shaped like a body bag. Lower-city residents hurried around her as though avoiding plague. No one dared let their gaze linger for even a second.
An unmarked black armored vehicle glided to a silent stop like a ghost. Its doors sprang open, and several fully armed inspectors stepped into the water. Their masks reflected the pitiless neon. Every movement was mechanical, without the slightest human hesitation.
The captain raised his right arm. A miniature projector on his wrist cast cold red text into the rain: 【CRYING IN PUBLIC IS FORBIDDEN】【TRIGGERED. TARGET MARKED: SOURCE OF EMOTIONAL CONTAMINATION】
The woman jerked up her head. Rain and tears ran together across a face twisted by unbearable grief. Instinctively she tightened her grip on the bundle. "My son is dead..." Her voice was raw, begging some mercy that did not exist. "I only..."
There was no warning. A deep-blue shock beam pierced her neck. Her scream was strangled before it could tear open the night, and she collapsed into the sewage, convulsing. The street went utterly still. Only the rain remained.
An inspector walked forward without expression and dragged her toward the vehicle like a sack of spoiled feed. The black plastic bundle struck the ground. Rain slowly loosened its cheap seal, and a child's mud-caked sneaker rolled out.
In Lower Nine City, rules never reasoned. They only executed. Pain was not permitted unless you could afford to buy it outright.
Chapter One: Rules Have a Price
Beneath an abandoned flyover, a vast temporary shed of corrugated metal was packed shoulder to shoulder. Cheap machine oil, sweat, and synthetic alcohol mingled in the air. The crowd were hyenas gathered at the edge of carrion, waiting for tonight's feast. At the entrance, a failing neon sign thrashed in the acid rain: RULE AUCTION HOUSE.
A-0 leaned in the shadow of a thick support column at the rear of the auction floor, slowly drawing on a blue-glowing synthetic cigarette. His face had the pallor of someone who had not seen daylight in years. The dark rings beneath his eyes were so heavy it seemed his soul had gone hundreds of hours without sleep.
A searchlight split the murky air like a blade and struck the central stage.
Old Tongue stood at the heart of the halo. He wore a burgundy velvet suit grotesquely out of place in the lower city. Most striking were the exposed metal trachea in his neck and the prosthetic eye turning in his left socket with a faint red glow. He raised a white-gloved hand and tapped his metal throat with elegant precision.
"Krrrsh—" A shrill current of high-frequency static swept through the hall over the amplifiers. The unrest below the stage died instantly.
"Welcome back, bastards." Old Tongue split his lips over metal teeth. From his coat he drew a dimly luminous rule card and held it high. "First lot tonight: 【PUBLIC PRESENCE +300%】. Valid for seventy-two hours. Opening bid: twenty-seven thousand credits."
The floor erupted. Hundreds of rough mechanical arms—some still smeared with blood—shot upward together while greedy bids crashed over one another.
"Not buying? This one's hot." A regular with a mouth full of yellow metal teeth sidled up to A-0. A-0 exhaled blue smoke, his gaze flat. "People who buy this junk usually don't live to see it expire." Cheap cards that forcibly altered physical presence often drained the host's cardiac blood supply. "Bring anything tonight?" the regular asked with a grin. "I did. Let's see who can afford it." A-0 looked past the crowd and fixed his eyes on the stage.
Old Tongue drew a second card. A dangerous ring of pink fluorescence ran around its edge. "Next—an extinct edition. Consigned by A-0." He deliberately stretched the words. A-0's eyes dropped below freezing.
"【When you speak an absolutely sincere truth before any mirror, your pupils emit a pink glow for thirty seconds.】" Old Tongue licked his lips as if tasting power. "In a city where even breathing is a lie, I shouldn't have to teach you what this is worth. Opening bid: eighty thousand."
"One hundred thousand!" "One fifty!" "Two hundred!" The bids climbed at once. Just as the room tipped toward frenzy, a low voice scraped out from the deepest part of the crowd like sandpaper on glass.
"Two hundred and thirty thousand."
The crowd instinctively opened a path. A man in heavy, burn-scarred armor and a pitch-black tactical mask walked forward. Ignoring every frightened stare, he went straight to the stage and reached into a seam in his chest armor.
With the wet, teeth-grinding sound of flesh tearing, the man ripped a faintly beating cloned heart from inside his body. Blood ran down his fingers and dripped onto the stage. The auction hall fell silent as death.
"Oh. A life wallet. Premium stock." A flash of fever passed through Old Tongue's mechanical eye. Without hesitation he took the heart and handed over the rule card.
The man accepted the card but did not look at Old Tongue or turn to leave. Slowly he raised his head. Through the black mask, his gaze crossed the crowd and pinned A-0 inside the shadows.
The fingers holding A-0's cigarette paused. That was not how one looked at a stranger. There was recognition in that gaze, and hesitation, and an obsession fate had failed to erase even after fire reduced everything else to ash. One of A-0's brows twitched almost imperceptibly. The man's gaze slid downward and stopped at the old wound on A-0's thigh, as if confirming a mark known only to the two of them.
A-0 crushed out his cigarette and turned toward the exit.
"Is that combat knife of yours still as fast, A-0?" Old Tongue suddenly leaned over the stage, his segmented metal tongue slipping across the corner of his mouth like a snake's.
A-0 stopped and looked back as though examining a corpse. "If that throat can still make noise... I must have gone easy on you back then." "Ten years, and you're still impossible to like." Old Tongue laughed like a broken bellows. "And you're still asking to die." Without looking back again, A-0 walked into the acid rain.
Chapter Two: The Fatal Stake
In a back alley of District Thirteen, heaps of rubbish rose like malformed architectural organs, reeking. A-0 leaned against a wet brick wall, unfolded an obsolete holographic display, and counted the credits in his account with practiced movements.
Then his swiping finger stopped.
High above him, at the summit of the refuse, a little girl sat in silence. A translucent industrial raincoat covered her sickly pale body. What made the sight truly unnerving was that her eyes were not eyes at all but two mechanical camera assemblies spinning and focusing at high speed. Worse, a charred hole gaped in her chest, leaking violet-blue sparks with every crackle.
"Uncle." The girl's voice sounded too hollow to belong to a living person.
A-0 said nothing. His right hand had already slipped soundlessly toward the combat knife at his lower back. In this city, the more harmless something looked, the deadlier it usually was.
"I have a rule to sell." The little girl held out a small hand.
A-0 looked at her palm. A rule card stained with dark red blood lay there. One glance made his pupils contract. Stamped into the lower-right corner was a skull biting a coin—the test mark Old Tongue had used exclusively for his early illegal experiments.
The writing on the card looked as though it had been drawn in congealed blood:
A citywide lethal logic lock. Code of the most vicious kind.
"Where did you get it?" A-0's voice was ice. "It fell out of my mother's brain." The girl answered with a calm so complete it was obscene. "Explain."
The girl lowered her head to the sparking cavity in her chest. "Yesterday my father said those words to my mother. Then the rule activated." She spoke as if recounting someone else's life. "Mother's shadow moved by itself and used a gun to blow Father's head apart." She paused; the cameras in her eyes made a faint focusing sound. "I jumped in front. The bullet went through my lung. Mother died later. The card fell out of her brain."
The rain intensified, hammering the sheet metal with a deafening roar. "I want to sell it," the girl said. "For what?" A-0 asked. "For a rule... that lets me cry."
A-0 narrowed his eyes at the monstrous child. "Do you know what this card is worth? How many people it can kill?" "I know." "And you're still selling it?" Mockery entered his voice. The girl raised her head. There were no tears in the depths of her camera eyes, only quiet static—the blankness of an empty system. "I want to learn how to cry first."
The cigarette between A-0's lips shifted slightly. He looked at the girl, then at the card. At last he reached out, brushed his thumb over its blood-caked corner, and took it.
A vibration as fine as an insect bite traveled from the card directly into his neural pathways. Green text flashed across his retina: 【OWNERSHIP TRANSFER COMPLETE】
Something changed in A-0's eyes, but he said nothing more. He removed the blue synthetic cigarette from his mouth and placed it between the girl's bloodless lips. "Take a drag. It'll dull the pain. I'll get you a rule for crying." She obediently inhaled. The harsh smoke sent her into violent coughs, and the sparks in her chest burst faster.
She tipped her head back and "looked" at A-0. "Thank you, Uncle." She paused—perhaps for only a tenth of a second—then spoke the deadliest phrase in the world with pure gratitude. "I love you."
Far away, the giant mechanical hands of an abandoned clock tower ground precisely toward midnight.
From the deepest layer of the system came the faintest sound—
Beep.
Chapter Three: Reverse Logic
A-0's face contorted in an instant.
It felt as if a row of high-voltage electrodes had been driven straight into the core of his spine. A strangled grunt escaped him, and both knees slammed into the muddy water.
An unnameable horror entered reality. The shadow stretched beneath him by a streetlamp twitched and swelled unnaturally, then violated every law of physics and rose upright from the ground.
"...Fuck." A-0 clenched his teeth as cold sweat soaked his back.
The black shadow detached from the pavement like a living thing with a will of its own. It split into barbed tendrils that lashed around A-0's arms. An irresistible absolute force dragged his hands toward the little girl's thin, fragile throat.
The rule had begun to execute. A-0 was now the person she "loved most," based on the crude logic anchor the system had just established. Therefore the system required A-0 to kill her with his own hands.
The girl froze, her cameras focusing in confusion on A-0's twisted face. "Uncle?" "Run!" Veins bulged across A-0's forehead; the taste of blood filled his clenched teeth.
But she did not run. Her missing emotional module left her unable to understand the murderous force in front of her.
The black coils tightened, their barbs driving deep into A-0's flesh. Only a few centimeters remained between his fingers and her neck.
At that instant, heavy military boots began striking the water at the alley mouth in a steady rhythm. A-0 forced his sweat-soaked face around. The masked man who had traded a heart for a rule card stood motionless in the rain.
The man approached, stopped, and watched A-0 being devoured by his own shadow. He raised a heavy-gloved hand and slowly removed the black mask.
Beneath it was a nightmare: a face almost destroyed by superheated plasma. The skin over the left half had shrunk to a glossy layer like old wax melted and set again. A ruined jawline barely held its shape, yet it was still possible to see that the face had once been sharply handsome.
A-0 stared at him. Deep in his mind, something rammed a memory door sealed beneath countless locks. It struck with a muffled boom but failed to break through.
The man ignored A-0's confusion. He took the newly purchased "Truth Before a Mirror" card from his pocket and slapped it into the exposed neural slot in his neck. A flash: system read complete. Then he unfolded a palm-sized mirrored diagnostic screen from his wrist armor and held it upright.
Bending over the small mirror, he fixed his intact mechanical eye on A-0's bloodshot stare. His voice was calm to the point of cruelty.
"I love you."
The next second, his mechanical eye shifted spectrum and blazed an eye-searing pink in the black rain. Absolute sincerity. No lie.
"What the fuck... who are you?" A-0's pupils shook.
Two rules. Causality stacked. Because the man had sincerely said "I love you," A-0 also became the person he loved most, and the rule ordered A-0 to kill him at once. Yet A-0 was already executing the order to kill the girl.
Two opposite system commands tore through A-0's body. He screamed despite himself. The shadow's force doubled exponentially. His arms felt caught between two maglev trains accelerating in opposite directions, and his finger bones cracked with a sickening series of snaps.
At last the girl understood death was coming and stumbled back in terror. "Don't..."
A-0 shook violently. His fingertips had already touched the cold skin of her neck. If he stopped resisting—if he obeyed the system and applied one more ounce of force—the rule would complete, and the agony ripping through his soul would end at once.
Blood filled A-0's eyes. He stared at the girl, then at the burned man. Obey the system. Kill them. End the pain. That was the optimal solution.
Suddenly A-0 laughed. He laughed like a lone wolf driven to the end of the world, biting its own fangs to pieces.
I was born to defy you...
"...You want to see me heel?" He forced the words from the bottom of his throat, then roared hard enough to tear the whole district open. "Get—the fuck—back!"
With fury and will beyond human limits, A-0 forced a hairline gap between the shadow tendrils locking his arms. Muscle fibers across his shoulders tore apart in an instant, warm blood exploding into the freezing rain. He used the recoil of his own body ripping open to smash through the rule's absolute restraint and shot out of the alley like a cannon shell entirely out of control.
The masked man straightened but did not follow. Silently he turned and placed himself before the little girl like a monument burned black.
A-0 staggered around the corner, his vision dissolving. He raised a heavy combat boot and drove it forward. Bang. A rusted iron door marked RULE MODIFICATION STATION burst inward.
Chapter Four: The Trump Card and the Patch
The modification station looked like the mechanical graveyard of a cybernetic psychopath. Thick bare cables hung from the ceiling like intestines. Old monitors, half-dismantled illegal prosthetics, and every model of rule-card reader-writer were piled into mountains.