Chapter 540 – The Resistance
Lux’s grin widened. Not the flirtatious kind. The real one. The dangerous kind, the one people had nightmares about after going bankrupt.
"The clash," he said, flexing his still-healing fingers. "The burn. The resistance. It wasn’t just so AI defense chanism or legacy firewall." His gaze sharpened. "It was him. He felt ."
"You think it was Zoltarin?" Corvus asked.
"I know it was. His consciousness. His soul, maybe. Fragnted. Hidden. But active. He’s in the network, Corvus."
Corvus took an uneasy hop to the edge of the coffee table. "Wait. Wait wait wait. You’re not saying what I think you’re saying."
Lux nodded. "I’m going in."
The raven squawked. "You want to fight him inside the network?!"
"Correct."
"Lux. You like to flirt with consequences, but this? This is getting dangerously close to spiritual suicide."
Lux leaned back into the couch and stretched his shoulders, rolling his neck. "You sleep on firewall scripts for fun, Corvus. Don’t act surprised."
"That’s ! I’m a damn bird with root access and zero self-preservation. You’re the heir to Greed, the one carrying the system, the estate, the harem, the trade ring—"
"I know what I carry."
Corvus flapped once. "Then why do sothing this stupid?"
"Because it’s the only way to track him. The link is ghost-tier. I can’t brute force it. I can’t triangulate it from the outside." He exhaled. "But if he felt ... that ans I can feel him too."
Corvus clicked his beak, puffed up, then deflated. "...You’re serious."
Lux closed his eyes for a beat. "System. Prepare safety protocols. Full override permission. If my consciousness destabilizes or corruption exceeds 4%, pull out imdiately."
[System: Preparing Safety Greed Protocols.]
[Mind-anchor and soul-thread safeguards activated.]
[Tir Lock: 10 minutes before auto-eject. Syncing...]
The room dimd slightly as the system’s power shifted focus. The walls shimred faintly. The runes beneath the carpet thrumd in pulse with Lux’s heartbeat. Lullaby, still half asleep beside him, rolled slightly but didn’t stir.
Lux stood. His coat fell open at the edges as he stepped toward the center of the room.
He flexed his still-sore fingers once. Twice.
"Corvus," he said. "Guard my body."
"...You’re serious."
"Always."
"...Don’t die."
Lux smirked faintly.
"I won’t. Not until I bankrupt him in his own domain."
Then, without another word, he sat cross-legged in front of the main console, hand outstretched toward the primary hologram.
"Activate TechnoGreed."
[TechnoGreed: ON.]
[Routing access...]
[Target: Unknown Ghost Link – GREED_TOWER_NOV23]
[Confirming identity...]
[Welco, Prince of Numbers.]
Everything exploded.
But not in color.
In code.
Black. Green. Gold. Circuitry carved in infernal dialects pulsed across his vision. The physical world dropped away like a curtain falling. His soul shifted forward, like peeling himself from his own body, his thoughts stretching beyond the confines of skin and bone.
He fell, but upward. Sideways. Every direction at once.
The world reshaped.
He landed in a corridor of lightless space, carved with threads of gold. The walls weren’t stone. They were contracts. Written in infernal glyphs and pulsing softly like mories.
He wasn’t standing in the tower.
He was standing in its blueprint.
The Old Greed Tower.
Its soul.
And it was... breathing.
Lux reached out.
Every step echoed. Not with sound. With value.
He stepped on investnts. On old debts. On buried pacts and long-lost algorithms etched in the blood of kings.
This was what Greed looked like, stripped down.
Pure. Eternal. Empty.
And sothing was watching him.
"Zoltarin," Lux called.
No response.
But the air... shifted. A pressure on the edge of his consciousness. A presence. It moved like oil through water. Slippery. Wrong.
Lux narrowed his eyes.
"Co out," he said. "You’ve been whispering from the vault long enough."
And then it happened.
The corridor twisted.
The contracts burned.
And from the smoke, a man appeared.
His figure was different than his appearance in the real world. Lux bet this was the appearance Zoltarin wanted.
Tall. Refined. Hands folded behind his back. Wearing the sa bloodline robes of House Vaelthorn... but older. Outdated. Imperial style from a century ago. His horns curved high. His hair was black and shimred like obsidian dust. And his eyes? They were mirrors, but... emptier.
"Well," the man said. "You’re early."
Lux didn’t blink and stepped forward. "You should’ve stayed quiet."
"And miss the chance to see my dear nephew try to run the empire I built?" Zoltarin’s voice was silk. Arrogant. Familiar. "You always were ambitious. But you’re not ready."
Lux’s fingers sparked with green data-light. "I’m more than ready."
"Oh?" Zoltarin lifted one hand. The corridor behind him opened like a data vault, revealing broken currencies, shattered trade glyphs, and twisted finance beasts made from corrupted numbers. "Then let’s see if you can walk through what I left behind."
Lux didn’t flinch.
Of course he didn’t. He’d expected this. The sll of corrupted wealth clung to the ghost-code like rotting platinum, gleaming but diseased. All the numbers in that vault behind Zoltarin shimred with incomplete decimals, cursed decimal points, and volatile projections. A nightmare for mortals. A trap for demons.
Lux glanced once at the display.
Yeah.
That was a trap.
The kind of trap designed to look like a legacy inheritance, an "opportunity", but rigged with desperation logic and ego-laced math to bait soone hungry for power.
He clicked his tongue and looked back at Zoltarin.
"No thanks."
Zoltarin’s expression flickered.
"What?" he said, tilting his head with mock offense. "You afraid?"
Lux raised an eyebrow. "Trying to gaslight , huh? Try harder."
The words cut clean. Surgical. No reaction in Lux’s face. He’d heard worse from boardrooms filled with warlords pretending to understand economic collapse. He could sll the manipulation in Zoltarin’s tone like burnt credit.
Zoltarin’s smile twitched.
Then twisted.
"You little—"
He moved.
Faster than Lux expected. His form blurred, and the corridor around them snapped, digits falling like ash. Zoltarin lunged, his hand a blade of corrupted gold, the kind used in soul-bond breakage contracts, jagged, ceremonial, expensive.
But Lux?
He was already gone.
Slid to the side like a flicker of green-glitch light.
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