Chương 47: Chapter 48: The Lower-Deck Market

The air pressure dropped with a sudden, heavy pop against Ethan's eardrums as he descended the final concrete flight of Block 52. He stepped directly into the dark, grease-caked alleyways of the Chinatown Sump (Sector 4), his heavy rubber boots sloshing through a shallow, lukewarm channel of industrial condensation runoff.

The gray water bubbled continuously against the masonry, caked in a thick, iridescent violet film of automated drone lubricating grease that had bled down from the high-altitude corporate towers above. There was no natural wind down here. The air was a dry, blasting, 36°C hyper-velocity draft driven entirely by the massive exhaust banks of the Central Business District skyscrapers, carrying the raw thermal friction and metallic tang of their sub-surface automated server coolers.

Ethan looked straight up through a narrow, jagged ventilation fissure in the blackened carbon-mesh drop-ceiling. The structural layout of the city was an explicit, physical caste map. High above the 150-metre mark, completely isolated from the toxic ground-level traps, sat the Canopy—a multi-layered paradise of interlocking geodesic Sky-Domes and pressurized sky-bridges where the mega-corporate families breathed mechanically scrubbed 24°C air and drank pure, distilled water.

But down here on the ground floor, beneath the massive carbon-mesh drop-ceilings designed to catch flash floods and heavy soot fallout, sat the Sumps. These ground corridors were nothing but humid, grease-caked industrial exhaust sinks designed to trap the boiling waste heat thrown off by the air-conditioning systems of the high-rent corporate towers above.

Through the microscopic, milky white chemical scars pitting his goggle lenses, the shimmering vehicle blurred and distorted, a distant golden ghost moving through a fractured sky, entirely un-rendered by the corporate infrastructure that left Sector 4 in the dark. Ethan turned his back on the light, navigating his way through the flickering neon glare of the lower-deck market stalls toward the automated corporate logistics depot. He didn't speak to a merchant.

He approached a rusted, grease-smeared terminal interface on the warehouse wall, swiping his local grid token. The terminal screen flickered, instantly deducting his credits alongside a newly updated amber text line: [Regional Sump Surcharge Implemented: +10% Freight Levy Accounted]. The heavy steel hatch groaned open, sliding a cylindrical, freezing steel canister of Grade 4 Synthetic Soy-Lipid Slurry onto the collection counter.

Ethan's fifty-four points of Perception immediately locked onto the fresh manufacturing stamp etched into the frozen steel neck: NET WEIGHT: 45. 00 KG. The corporate monopolies were charging his smart-grid node for fifty kilograms of life-support material while secretly throttling the physical mass by ten percent to optimize their real-world margins. The inflation squeeze was tightening down to the final decimal grain.

He reached into his tool-bag for his father's old canvas harness, his fingers instinctively tightening to hoist it with the effortless, weightless snap of his Level 40 virtual strength—only for his slight, flesh-and-bone wrist to violently buckle under the raw, unmitigated gravity of sixty-five kilograms of frozen steel and dead iron buckles.. This was the sump floor; there were no attribute multipliers down here to absorb the shock.

He slid his arms through the frayed straps, buckling the reinforced steel plates across his chest with a heavy, metallic clink. Stamped deep into the cold metal of the buckles was an official, hard-encrypted corporate asset tracking code: TUAS-AUTOMATION-PHASE-2034. As he leaned forward to hoist the freezing cylinder onto his back, his real-world shoulders violently sagged under the unyielding strain, his slight, undernourished human frame bucking as his spine compressed.

The rough canvas straps ground directly through his thin haptic undersuit, biting raw into the skin of his collarbones. The freezing steel of the canister instantly bit through the synthetic mesh, freezing his shoulder blades. The physical agony of the weight uncoiled the data strings of his memory, dragging his mind back to the exact year stamped on the harness buckles.

His parents hadn't been low-status scrapper crews; they were top-tier automation and infrastructure engineers who graduated right before the middle-market was deleted by enterprise AI. In 2034, they had landed elite contracts to manage the massive sub-surface quantum battery arrays during the Tuas Port's automation overhaul. The corporate betrayal had happened in less than three seconds. A catastrophic thermal runaway event had occurred in the deep power vaults.

To protect the high-value server mainframes and quantum arrays from oxygen exposure, the corporate consortium's automated fire-suppression grid executed a cold, mathematical calculation: it locked the heavy titanium security doors from the outside, trapping the human engineers inside the vacuum seal to smother the flames. His parents' lives had been weighed against the infrastructure assets, and the ledger had demanded their erasure. The legal teams of the syndicate had finished the squeeze.

They invoked a microscopic contract clause classifying the disaster as an "Unforeseen System Latency," systematically wiping out the family's insurance claims and liquidating their remaining smart-grid units to pay for the "system cleanup overhead." His grandmother had only survived by fleeing into Sector 4 with Ethan and his father's old diagnostic harness, leaving them with nothing but a frozen student debt line and a broken haptic capsule.

Ethan's teeth ground together behind the rubber seal of his filter mask, a cold, predatory focus locking into his eyes behind his scarred goggles. He drove his heels into the wet silt floor, using the leverage of his father's harness to violently hoist the freezing canister clear of the counter. His physical lungs burned, the charcoal filters of his mask rattling with a dry, hollow wheeze as he turned back toward Block 52.

The corporate syndicates thought they had cleaned the ledger when they buried his parents beneath the Tuas concrete and priced him out of the Kent Ridge campus. But they had left a survivor who knew exactly how their software frameworks operated. Ten minutes later, Ethan kicked open the door to Room 12-04. He dumped the freezing canister onto the floor, manually locking the high-pressure lines directly into the medical pod's oxidized bronze intake valves.

He grabbed his wire brush, furiously scraping the yellow sulphur crust off the internal thermal needles until the pod's interface stabilised into a deep, beautiful green. He sat back down on the edge of his haptic capsule, pulling the damp mesh sleeves back over his arms. He lowered his visor, sealing the haptic seals around his skull as his inner clock synchronised with the upcoming server shift.